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THE MONUMENT AT PROVINCETOWN 



CAPE COD 

AND 

THE OLD COLONY 



BY 

ALBERT PERRY BRIGHAM, Sc.D. 

PROFESSOR OF GEOLOGY IN COLGATE UNIVERSITY 



With 35 Illustrations and Maps 



G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS 

NEW YORK AND LONDON 

TLbe fmtcfterbocfeer press 
1920 



ft 

■Cs 



Copyright, igao 

BY 

ALBERT PERRY BRIGHAM 




AUG 28 |&©CU576303 



THIS STORY OF OLD COLONY SHORES 

OUTPOST OF NEW ENGLAND 
ENVIRONING MEN OF OLD ENGLAND 

Is Inscribed in Memory of 

ANDREW JOHN HERBERTSON 

PROFESSOR of geography in oxford university 

LOYAL FRIEND, TEACHER AND INSPIRER OF MANY 

CREATIVE THINKER IN THE REALM OF MAN'S RELATION 

TO THE EARTH 



PREFACE 

The author made his first and long deferred 
visit to Cape Cod in the summer of 19 15. 
There on the highlands of Truro, with their 
superb air, marvelous views and the freedom 
of untrammeled nature,, the Cape cast its spell 
upon him. Fugitive excursions on the upper 
parts of the great foreland revealed to him its 
variety of beauty and its significant history- 
sent him to libraries where loving annalists 
had written what they knew and felt about the 
land of their fathers. 

Old as the Old Colony is in the story of 
America, it is not well known, and even those 
who visit it have small means of understanding 
its hills, lakes and shorelines. Thoreau saw 
but a small part of the Cape, and that in a 
remote time when its physical evolution was 
unknown and the human unfolding lacked the 
stages of the last half century. Other writers 
have touched the life and lore of special places, 
leaving room, it would seem, for a study on 
broader lines, and savoring a little more of the 
order which a student of science would try to 
give it. 



vi Preface 

The volume is not a history and it is not ageo- 
graphy, though it cannot presume to be quite 
innocent of either subject. While explaining 
rather carefully the physical features that lie 
all about Cape Cod Bay, the real motive is the 
way men have used these lands and waters and 
come under their influence. Old Colony men 
have been bred to the sea, but they have had 
a developing continent behind them. Salt 
waters and the opening of wide lands have 
interplayed in the destiny of the Pilgrims and 
their children. How the first colonists and 
those who followed them have adjusted them- 
selves to the mobile conditions of nature and 
of man, is the theme of the chapters that 
follow. 

Many obligations have been incurred — so 
many indeed, that all must be generally ac- 
knowledged save one. Professor J. B. Wood- 
worth of Harvard University has for many 
years observed and written upon these frontier 
lands of Massachusetts, and has generously 
placed his knowledge at the disposal of the 
author. Chapters II and III gain much in 
fullness and accuracy through this contri- 
bution of friendly aid. 

A. P. B. 

April, 1920. 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGB 

I. — The Pilgrims around the Bay . i 

II. — The Origin of the Cape . . 32 

III. — The Changing Shoreline . 69 

IV. — Old Colony Names and Towns . 101 

V. — On the Land 141 

VI. — The Harvest of the Waters . .180 

VII. — Roads and Waterways . . 205 

VIII. — Three Centuries of Population . 233 

IX. — The Environment of the Sea . 255 

Index 279 



vu 



ILLUSTRATIONS 



The Monument at Provincetown Frontispiece 



Clark's Island from Saquish 

Plymouth, Leyden Street in 1622 

Standish House and Monument, Duxbury 

Map of the Cape Cod Region . 

Triangle Pond, in a Kettle Hole, Sand 
wich 



Glacial Map of Cape Cod Region . 
Glacial Boulder on Clark's Island . 
The Clay Pounds, Truro . 
Cliffs and Boulder Beach of Manomet 

Forested Dunes and the Provincetown 

Monument . . 



Dunes of Sandy Neck . . 

The Wind Makes Circles with Drooping 
Beach Grass 



A Provincetown Alley 



8 



14 



/ 



20 
24 V 

40 

46 

58 

72^ 

80/ 

88 
92 v 

98 • 
106 



IX 



Illustrations 



Plymouth, Leyden Street To-day 

Rendezvous Lane in Barnstable Village 

Falmouth across Shiverick Pond 

Chatham about Mill Pond 

Street in Provincetown .... 

Great Marshes of Barnstable . 

Handpicking of Cranberries. The Neces- 
sary Sandbank is Close at Hand 

The Cranberry Harvest, with the Scoop 

Massachusetts Forest Nursery, Barn- 
stable Bay and Sandy Neck 

Ancient Mill at Hyannis .... 

Provincetown Docks when the Tide is 
Out .... 

Fishing Strand, Chatham . 

The Voyage is Ended 

Cliffs at Highland Light 

Highland Light . 

The Canal 

Population of Barnstable County and of 
Provincetown and Truro 



PAGE 
112 

120- 

128^ 

I30V 



V 



I38 v 
148 

152 
156' 



164V 
172/ 

182 
188^ 
208 
212 7 

2l6v 
224. 

236 



Illustrations xi 

PACE 

Many Like this on the Cape . . . 248 

Shore Ice in the Bay .... 262 

Quisset Harbor ...... 268 

The Power that Changes the Shore 276 



Cape Cod 

and 

The Old Colony 



CHAPTER I 

THE PILGRIMS AROUND THE BAY 

Standing on the high moors of Truro on a 
clear day, one may see the circuit of Cape Cod 
Bay. Low on the horizon are the woodlands 
that lie back of Barnstable and Sandwich, the 
cliffs and forest crown of Manomet, the Plym- 
outh shore and the Standish monument rising 
from Captain's Hill in Duxbury. Or if one 
stands on Cole's Hill above Plymouth Rock, 
he discerns twenty-five miles eastward, the 
Pilgrim monument at Provincetown, which, 
with its dune foundation, rises more than three 
hundred feet above the surface of the Bay. 
At night, Highland Light with its fourfold 



2 Cape Cod 

flash will gleam across the water in neighborly 
fashion. Likewise from Sandy Neck or Yar- 
mouth Port, the Provincetown monument 
rises in the north as if out of the sea. Thus 
Cape Cod Bay is not so vast as it seemed to 
childish eyes, as they searched the atlas map, 
to answer the questions of location which in 
the old days were called geography. 

Keeping our perch on the highlands of 
Truro and turning eastward — there is the out- 
side of the Cape — the Atlantic Ocean; and 
the imagination, if not the eye, reaches across 
the waters to the Bay of Biscay, Lisbon, Cadiz, 
and Gibraltar. The transatlantic voyager 
does not see the Cape in these days, but for 
many a traveler in the early time this fore- 
land was the first to approach and the last to 
leave, and the coastwise traveler must always 
pass it within neighborly distance. Cape Cod 
belongs to the ocean and it belongs to the 
continent, a kind of hinge on which the new 
continent swung open to the old, a little wil- 
derness which quite unconsciously became a 
pivot of modern civilization. 

Geologically speaking, New England is old, 
all but the southeast corner of it, and that 
is young. Historically however this wave- 
washed bit of country is old, as the white 
man counts time in the new world. In its 



The Pilgrims Around the Bay 3 

shape and its making here is a unique foreland. 
The physiographer does not know any annex 
to any continent that is just like it. Other 
narrow peninsulas there are, enough of them, 
Cornwall in England, Kintyre in Scotland, the 
threadlike Malay peninsula, long promon- 
tories in the fiord regions of Alaska and Nor- 
way — but these are all rocky and rugged — 
nowhere else is there a frail, glacial peninsula, 
standing out seventy miles into an ocean, with 
bedrock so far down that no sea chiseling and 
no boring has ever reached a square foot of it. 
And here Cape Cod has maintained itself, 
losing on its borders but still surviving, during 
some thousands, perhaps many thousands of 
years, against the fierce onset of the unhin- 
dered Atlantic. 

The shores of Cape Cod Bay, east, south 
and west, are the lands of the Pilgrims. 
Duxbury, which has its name from the Dux- 
borough Hall of the Standish family in 
England, is almost due west from Province- 
town and the tip of the Cape. At Province- 
town, the passengers of the Mayflower landed. 
At Plymouth, a month later they settled. At 
Duxbury, some miles north of Plymouth, 
Miles Standish later chose his home, and here 
he and the Aldens, John and Priscilla Mullens 
his wife, lie buried. 



4 Cape Cod 

The Pilgrim monument on the dunes of 
Provincetown is the outer sentinel. At Dux- 
bury, is the Standish monument, the inner 
landmark of the Bay. At the end of Duxbury 
Beach, are the Gurnet Lights, answering to 
Race Point and Highland Light on the outer 
parts of the Cape. On every side save the 
north this water was environed with the life 
of the Pilgrims. 

The mainland base from which springs 
Barnstable County or the Cape, is the south 
and eastern part of Plymouth County. Like 
the Cape, it is of recent origin. Geologically, 
the circuit of the Bay is of one piece — sands, 
gravels, light soils, moraine hills, lakes, 
marshes, outwash plains and changing strand 
belts of sandy cliff and migrating dunes. It 
is a frail, changing and perishable bit of country. 

It is not strange that the Mayflower voya- 
gers found the Cape Country — we might 
almost say that the Cape found them as it had 
caught other venturesome voyagers in the first 
twenty years of the seventeenth century. It 
is easy to forget that at the time of the Leyden 
Pilgrims a hundred and twenty-eight years had 
passed since the first landfall of Columbus, 
and the New England shores were not quite 
as mysterious to intelligent Englishmen as we 
are likely to think. Nor did the Mayflower 



The Pilgrims Around the Bay 5 

discover the Plymouth site or even give it 
its name. 

What the Vikings may have done or seen 
on this coast is not a part of our story, nor 
need we vex ourselves with historical enigmas 
concerning the voyager of the sixteenth cen- 
tury. We do know that Bartholomew Gosnold 
in 1602 anchored in Provincetown Harbor, 
and gave to the point of land that incloses that 
haven, the name of Cape Cod. This visit 
was made when Gosnold was on his way to 
the attempted settlement on the Elizabeth 
Islands. 

Martin Pring, representing shipping inter- 
ests in the port of Bristol, came to these waters 
in 1603, and remained six weeks in Plymouth 
Harbor. He planted seeds to prove the char- 
acter of the soil and gathered shiploads of 
sassafras. He called the place Saint John's 
Harbor. Winsor's Narrative and Critical His- 
tory has a vivid passage emphasizing this pre- 
Mayflower familiarity which Englishmen had 
gained with the Plymouth country. "Thus 
two years before Champlain explored Plym- 
outh Harbor, ten years before the Dutch 
visited the place, calling it Crain Bay, and 
seventeen years before the arrival of the Ley- 
den pilgrims, Englishmen had become familiar 
with the whole region and had loaded their 



6 Cape Cod 

ships with the fragrant products of the neigh- 
boring woods." 

. A few years after Pring's visit, Champlain, 
an officer of the DeMonts expedition, im- 
pressed by the gleaming sands of the dunes, 
called the foreland Cape Blanc, and in 1614, 
Captain John Smith, thinking of his king, 
named it Cape James. This name did not 
stick, but New England, a designation first 
used by Smith, fastened itself to the great 
regions east of the Hudson and Lake Cham- 
plain. To have made this contribution to the 
geographic furnishings of the new continent 
was honor enough for any explorer. Smith, 
sailing in a shallop from Monhegan, made a 
map of the coast, which he took home to his 
Prince, later Charles the First. It was he, 
who, using this map, named Plymouth, Charles 
River and Cape Anne. Other names which he 
gave did not cling, but these have remained. 
It is probable enough that the Mayflower 
company intended to settle farther south, in 
the Hudson or Delaware country, and that 
they were turned back by the dangers of the 
stormy seas in the neighborhood of the Nan- 
tucktet Shoals. As this is a problem for his- 
torians, we need not rehearse the oft- told 
discomforts and tragedies of the month in 
Provincetown Harbor, or the rarious march- 



The Pilgrims Around the Bay 7 

ings and discoveries on the lower Cape, of 
Captain Standish and his small company. 
Here they found, took and later paid for, those 
first stores of Indian corn, thus getting the 
seed for the crops on Plymouth fields, the har- 
vests that saved the colony from extinction. 
This was a blessing which they could as little 
imagine as they could forecast the prairies 
rustling with corn three hundred years later, 
or the institutions of Ohio, Wisconsin and 
Nebraska, into which their life and their prin- 
ciples were to enter long generations after the 
plots on Burial Hill had grown green over 
their bones. Standish explored the lower Cape 
as far up as Nauset, the Eastham of to-day, 
and the next project was that complete roimd 
of the Bay, made after the Mayflower carpen- 
ters had gotten the shallop ready. A month 
had passed and December was far advanced 
before this memorable voyage was begun. We 
who know the Cape in smiling summer days 
may imagine if we can, a bleak winter sea, a 
few unknown savages on the bordering shore — 
no home, no light, no life guard, no guiding 
church steeple, and no goal in the distance 
save wintry fields and ice-sheathed forests. 
In these fields and out of these forests in mid- 
winter homes were to be built and the founda- 
tions of a new world laid down. 



8 Cape Cod 

If anybody knows, nobody seems to tell how 
much or how little this exploring party knew 
of the Plymouth that had already been so 
many times visited. Whether accidents can 
happen in great events that shape destiny, 
perhaps we cannot know. What stirs us to 
this observation is the record of a blinding 
snowstorm that was falling around the May- 
flower explorers as they passed the opening 
into Barnstable Harbor. Here between Sandy 
Neck Light and the present Yarmouth Port, 
is a wide gateway inviting a mariner with 
small craft to quiet and well-protected waters 
behind miles of barrier beach, and leading up 
where green meadows, laden orchards and 
gracious homes now mark the ancient settle- 
ments of Barnstable. If snow had not been 
coming down during a particular half-hour in 
the afternoon of a December day, in this part 
of Cape Cod Bay, the beginnings of the Old 
Colony, of the Bay State, of New England, 
might have been on Cape Cod, and sleepy old 
Barnstable might have been the theater of 
retrospect and rejoicing in the festive days 
of 1920. 

At length, in the cold storm and dim light 
of waning day, with frozen clothing and be- 
numbed fingers, they drew into the gateway 
that opened between Pier Head on their left 



The Pilgrims Around the Bay 9 

and Saquish Head on their right. Pier Head 
was the outer end of Plymouth Beach, whose 
long, narrow belt of sand, then more or less 
wooded, they could perhaps follow southward 
toward the point where it springs from the 
mainland north of the Pilgrim Hotel of to-day. 
Saquish, on their right, was a glacial hill, an 
island in those days, not yet tied by its thread 
of sand to the hill of the Gurnet lights and the 
long Duxbury Beach. They steered their 
course northward, past Saquish, and made 
their landing on Clark's Island. 

Rather too much has been said and writ- 
ten and painted about Plymouth Rock, or at 
least not enough heed has been paid to Clark's 
Island. This was the first landing place of 
the Pilgrims, if not exactly in Plymouth Har- 
bor, in the adjoining waters of Duxbury. Too 
many good people jump on the rock, or pho- 
tograph their friends under its granite canopy, 
without knowing that there is a Clark's Island 
or what happened there. The island, like 
Saquish or Gurnet, is a glacial hill, barely 
three fourths of a mile long, around which rise 
at high tide the shallow waters of Duxbury 
Bay. There are low cliffs cut by the waters 
on its shores, a farm home or two and a few 
trees. On the island is a tablet marking the 
first landing of Mayflower men on the west 



io Cape Cod 

side of Cape Cod Bay, and recording their 
Sunday rest and worship in a spot, cold 
enough, bleak enough, while securing these 
tired and hungry, but devout and determined, 
men from savage attack. 

On Monday morning under better skies the 
advance guard of the Mayflower landed on the 
site of the real Plymouth, but certainly they 
were not led by the sturdy maiden tread of 
Mary Chilton. They had found, and before 
much time passed, they had definitely chosen 
the best place around the bay for the Pilgrim 
home. We shall see what they found there 
and why they picked the place. What were 
the things that Plymouth afforded that a 
group of weary and half -frozen men from over 
the sea would want? 

Not the least boon was a good harbor, and 
here they found fully protected waters. They 
set out for a far remove from the old world, 
but isolation from it was no part of their plan. 
Relations they would continue to have with 
it if their king would let them, of fealty, of 
blood kinship, and of trade. One could not 
imagine a pioneer American colony planted 
other than on a tidal water. Most of Plym- 
outh Harbor was and is a clam flat at low 
tide but there was a channel, now improved 
for the larger craft of modern years. There 



The Pilgrims Around the Bay 1 1 

was moreover abundance of fish and of shell- 
fish. Even at this early time, for a full cen- 
tury, Europeans had known the fishing 
grounds along the American shores, and while 
we, conning over school histories, think only 
of the Cabots and Gosnolds and Gilberts, the 
Hudsons and John Smiths, troops of fishing 
ships had loaded their holds there for the mar- 
kets of Europe. The Mayflower people were 
hungry; at least they were in grave danger of 
being hungry, and the conveniences for clam 
digging and cod fishing and eel catching that 
here offered themselves were not to be despised. 

Better than all else here was a strip of 
cleared and cultivated land. Nobody knows, 
or ever can know how many generations of red 
men had lived and died there on ground that 
was opened by their ancestors and subject to 
the not ineffective processes of aboriginal agri- 
culture. What it would have meant, in the 
grip of winter, with houses to build, the sick 
to nurse and the dead to bury, to prepare 
forest ground for spring planting — well, there 
is no need to imagine, for it would have lain 
beyond human power. 

It is not in some parts of Cape Cod a light 
matter to secure a supply of fresh water, but 
this problem needed no resolving at Plymouth, 
for here was Town Brook, though the new- 



12 Cape Cod 

comers did not then know the large and lovely 
water from which it flows and perhaps they 
did not at first see that here was power for 
a mill. There are several other streams and 
springs along the Plymouth shore which they 
did find, and count among the good gifts of 
Providence. 

There were also ample forests at hand as 
there are to-day. Among the homes and mills 
of busy Plymouth one may follow the tourist 
bent, and forget that now a mile back takes 
one into a shady wilderness of trees and lakes. 
No doubt there were larger trees than now, 
for man had not been much abroad with the 
axe and the gypsy moth had not carried its 
ravages over eastern New England. Wood 
was needed for fuel, lumber for homes and 
timber for ships, and it was standing but a 
bowshot from their plantation. 

Whether the Plymouth company knew it at 
first or not, they had hit upon a country almost 
empty of savages. Only a few years before, 
some pestilence, whose nature no one has dis- 
covered, swept away all the ancient Americans 
of the Old Colony save a few and left their 
haunts open and comparatively safe for 
Europeans. The little company from Leyden 
had burdens enough and dangers enough, but 
they did not have at first to meet a horde of 



The Pilgrims Around the Bay 13 

savage enemies. Finally, a seventh very good 
feature of Plymouth was the presence of a 
hill, overlooking the log houses of the first 
street, commanding the harbor, and best of 
all, separated by a valley from the higher 
ground of the forested interior. The advan- 
tages of this hill did not escape the eye of 
Standish, and here they built their fort, 
planted their cannon, set up their worship, and 
after the first sorrowful buryings on Cole's 
Hill, above the rock, hither they brought their 
dead. After all the most storied spot in Plym- 
outh is not the rock, it is the fortress, the 
sanctuary, the place of long rest — Burial Hill. 
It was right that the Pilgrims should settle 
not on the long and wave-washed Cape, but 
on the broader mainland, part of the continent, 
that stretched, how far they did not know, 
westward. But that being true, Plymouth has 
always had and has to-day, a curious isolation. 
One may approach it through Scituate, and 
Marshfield, and find a linked chain of settle- 
ments, but from any other direction he must 
go through — with apologies to the dwellers in 
a few hamlets — a wilderness. This is true 
whether we choose Whitman, or Middleboro, 
or Sagamore, as our gateway — in any of these 
we find an entrance upon the Plymouth woods, 
upon a country of which perhaps one hun- 



H Cape Cod 

dredth part is under the plough, and a lake, 
or a cranberry bog is a more common sight 
than a gathering of humankind. The envi- 
ronment and background of Plymouth, were 
not suited to make it a Boston, or a Providence, 
or a Portland — it is Plymouth, and of more 
worth to Americans, a deeper fountain of noble 
sentiment because it is just Plymouth. 

Of the soil, Bradford wrote of "a spit's 
(spade) depth of excellent black mould and fat 
in some places." He names nine sorts of trees 
and various vines, fruits, herbs and fibers, 
also sand, gravel and clay, the last like soap 
and "excellent for pots." Nearly two hundred 
acres were finally allotted to individuals, after 
the colonists had experimented with commu- 
nistic culture, and come close to starvation. 
They learned that even the stern principles 
that brought them over the sea could not fully 
control their human qualities and that some 
would be lazy if they did not work with the 
lure of private ownership. 

The lands thus assigned lay in a strip about 
a quarter of a mile in greatest width and fol- 
lowing the shore for nearly two miles. It is 
believed that the choice of these lands by the 
Indians was due to the running streams which 
cross them, streams which afforded herring 
in plenty to be used as a fertilizer. 



The Pilgrims Around the Bay 15 

Behind Plymouth and Duxbury Beaches are 
the combined waters of Plymouth Harbor, 
Kingston Bay and Duxbury Bay, a protected 
area about eight miles from north to south, 
bordered by a much curved shoreline. The 
explorers liked the Jones River whose borders 
form the site of the old village of Kingston, 
but they did not settle there because they 
would be farther from the fishing, "our prin- 
cipal profit," and because the ground was so 
thoroughly covered with forest that they 
would be in danger of Indian attack, "our 
number being so little and so much ground to 
clear." These terse quotations are from 
Mourt's Relation. 

The villages of Onset and Wareham stand 
on northern arms of Buzzards Bay, and are 
sometimes rather loosely thought of as summer 
places on the Cape. But what is Cape Cod? 
It is the peninsula from Buzzards Bay to 
Provincetown. Strictly it should be the Prov- 
incetown spit with its dunes and beaches and 
the name was at one time so used, Province- 
town Harbor being then the Cape Cod Bay. 
But the usage of almost three hundred years 
prevails, the Cape is all of that curved exten- 
sion of the mainland which is Barnstable 
County. 

The Old Colony — what is that? It is Cape 



16 Cape Cod 

Cod and a piece of the adjoining mainland 
from a point on the south shore between Scitu- 
ate and Cohasset, and following a line running 
thence to Narragansett Bay, thus taking in 
parts of eastern Rhode Island. Even Plym- 
outh is sometimes thought to be on the Cape. 
Untrue as this is, there is close kinship both 
of the physical and human sort. The same 
people are there and much of Plymouth 
County has, like the Cape, a foundation of 
glacial drift, so deep that the hard rocks be- 
neath the cover have never been found. 

Hence the Cape and the adjoining territory 
form what a modern geographer would call a 
natural region. It is a unit in its physical evo- 
lution — in its drift subsoil, its surface and in 
climate and flora, and it takes in the vital 
parts of the Old Colony, Plymouth, Kingston, 
Duxbury and the whole chain of Pilgrim places 
from Sandwich and Falmouth to Barnstable, 
Nauset and Provincetown. 

The names Old Colony and Plymouth Col- 
ony mean the same thing. The domain in- 
cluded all of Plymouth County except Hing- 
ham and Hull and a small part of Brockton. 
It took in also all of Barnstable County, all of 
Bristol County and several towns in Rhode 
Island, but did not include Nantucket or 
Martha's Vineyard. The description of the 



The Pilgrims Around the Bay 17 

Old Colony in this volume limits itself to the 
Cape and the coastal strip of Plymouth, and 
does not take in the bedrock country lying on 
the west. 

Tourists swarm in Plymouth in summer 
days. If they come by motor car or on the 
daily excursion boat from Boston, they see the 
rock, spend a half-hour among the relics of 
Pilgrim Hall, go up Ley den Street and look 
at the headstones of Burial Hill, drive around 
the Pilgrim monument, and, let us hope, im- 
agine the Mayflower at anchor in the harbor. 
A few go back to Scrooby and Ley den and the 
older Plymouth, and try to make their own 
the first humble homes, the sorrows of the 
first year and the joy of the first thanksgiving. 

But it is better to sleep in Plymouth, many 
times if it may be, and to live into its shores, 
its streets, its hills and its ancient homes, to 
find in its modest public library the shelves 
in the corner that are full of Plymouth books, 
and thus to share the loving industry and the 
long memories that have counted no detail of 
topography or genealogy or local annals too 
small to be put into record. One can find in 
almost any town, especially in any New 
England town, the right people, those who 
know and revere their past, who will share 
their lore with the stranger. They are children 



1 8 Cape Cod 

of their soil, born of the blood of those men 
and women who crossed the sea and laid the 
foundations. Let Americans fill days in Plym- 
outh, and find their Americanism thereafter 
true and deep. Whatever may happen with 
the swift changes of the future, the towns of 
the Old Colony have not lost their past, and 
it is inscribed deeper than are the writings on 
memorial tablets; it is shrined in the harbor, 
in the outer beach, in Gurnet and Clark's 
Island and Town Brook, in the old cornfields 
where thousands of people live to-day, and in 
the hills, woods and waters of Billington Sea. 

Only two miles from the Pilgrim spring and 
the homes of the Brewsters and Bradf ords at 
the Leyden Street crossing, the closed waters 
of the harbor end and the bouldery cliffs and 
wooded heights of Manomet begin. Directly 
behind the town a walk of barely more than a 
mile carries one along the full course of Town 
Brook. The wonder is that the Plymouth peo- 
ple, fresh from their little England, did not 
call it a river, for it is a strong and perennial 
stream, though the factories on its banks have 
partly outgrown this source of power. 

A delightful woodland of moraine hills, sur- 
rounds the source of the Brook, which is Bil- 
lington Sea, and these woods, or parts of them, 
are the great public park of the enlarging town. 



The Pilgrims Around the Bay 19 

With all its beauty, its restful seclusion, and 
its wide waters, this playground seems to be 
little used. It is not easy to reach, and per- 
haps after all the look of Plymouth is and al- 
ways will be toward the sea. It is not easy to 
wean a people from salt water. And it may 
be, if the Plymouth folk were less conserva- 
tive, that they would have changed the name 
of their largest lake, for John Billington was 
not saintly, living though he did with Brewster 
and Bradford as his nearest neighbors. The 
Billington blood seems to have been turbulent, 
for the elder son of the unhappy pilgrim was 
the boy that was lost in the wilderness of 
Nauset and recovered by Standish in a historic 
excursion down the Cape; and it was Francis 
Billington, the younger son, who climbed a 
tall tree, and discovered the inland water 
which now bears his family name. 

From Plymouth before many years had 
passed, there was a migration northward, but 
it did not go far, being confined to the borders 
of Kingston and Duxbury Bays, and the 
neighboring town of Marshfleld. We should 
look vainly on Burial Hill for the memorials 
of William Brewster, Miles Standish and of 
John Alden and Priscilla. These are found 
in Duxbury, whither these Mayflower families 
betook themselves to establish their homes. 



20 Cape Cod 

Here also is the Standish cottage built by the 
Pilgrim soldier's son, and here on Captain's 
Hill, in a rough open plot at the summit of the 
pine-clad slopes, is the Standish monument. 
Duxbury was settled in 1630, and the nearer 
Kingston, the "North End of Plymouth" 
dates seven years later. Here lived a de- 
scendant of William Bradford, and here was 
kept the Bradford manuscript of Pilgrim 
history before it began its mysterious jour- 
ney to England, and its long repose in Brit- 
ish archives. 

Farther north in Marshfield lived Governor 
Josiah Winslow, the first American-born ruler 
of Plymouth Colony^ and here his father, 
Governor Edward Winslow of the Mayflower, 
was married to Susannah White. This was 
the first marriage in the new colony, being 
celebrated in 1621. Marshfield also holds the 
grave of Peregrine White, born upon the May- 
flower during its sojourn across the Bay in 
Provincetown Harbor, in 1620. 

These settlements in the north were little 
more than local annexes to the parent group 
at Plymouth, but soon began a movement 
down the Cape, which did not reach its goal 
until Provincetown was incorporated in 1727. 
From its first permanent settlement, however, 
the whole Cape was a part of Plymouth Col- 



The Pilgrims Around the Bay 21 

ony, until in 1792 the latter was absorbed in 
the royal province of Massachusetts. 

In the years just before 1640 movements 
began in the direction of the Cape. There was 
discontent with the conditions of living in 
Plymouth and this led some to think of moving 
the whole colony to Nauset, the present East- 
ham. The unwisdom of such a change was 
discovered in time to avert inevitable failure, 
"for this place was about fifty miles from hence 
and at an outside of the country remote from 
all society, also that it would prove so straight 
as it would not be competent to receive the 
whole body, much less be capable of any addi- 
tion or increase." Thus in old-style phrase 
is gathered the whole argument, and it is 
confirmed by seeing how the map of the Cape 
narrows between Orleans and Wellfleet. 

Still the bare-looking fields of this wind-swept 
plain were esteemed productive in those days, 
and in 1644 the more restless spirits migrated 
to Nauset and received a grant of lands there. 
But these men did not make the first settle- 
ment on the Cape. This, as was natural, was 
accomplished near the base of the Cape with 
easy approach from Plymouth, within a couple 
of miles of the new canal, in the town of 
Sandwich. This oldest town on Cape Cod was 
settled in 1637. In going from Plymouth we 



m Cape Cod 

now first cross the town of Bourne, but this 
town is young, having been set off from Sand- 
wich during the last century. 

Sandwich, however, though it has to this 
day people of Mayflower blood, was not main- 
ly set up by Plymouth people. Hither came 
between twenty and thirty settlers from Lynn 
and Saugus, among them the Freeman family, 
a name which remains on the Cape both in liv- 
ing representatives and in an honorable fame. 
Here belongs the author of that great history 
of Barnstable County which brought the story 
of the Cape down to the decade following the 
middle of the last century. Miles Standish and 
John Alden were the surveyors who established 
the bounding lines of this old town, whose 
oldest structure, the Tupper House, is said 
to go back to the year of the founders, 1637. 

The village of Sandwich is about sixteen 
miles in an air line from the municipality of 
Plymouth, and if we except the village of 
Sagamore, which is close to Sandwich, there 
is not yet a settlement larger than a hamlet 
in this long stretch of wooded wilderness. 
But there was time in those days for long 
walking journeys and a score of miles by a 
forest trail were not more baffling to the pio- 
neer than is a three-mile tramp to the coddled 
traveler of to-day. 



The Pilgrims Around the Bay 23 

The settlement of Barnstable, the county 
seat of Barnstable County, dates two years 
from the founding of Sandwich, or 1639. 
Standish had come into Barnstable Bay, in 
his search for the lost John Billington in July, 
1 62 1, and thus we know that for nearly a 
score of years, the dunes of Sandy Neck, the 
green of the great marshes, and the wooded 
hills that rose to the southward, were familiar 
to the Plymouth men. Here Standish had met 
Iyanough, the friendly Indian chief whose 
name appears in the modern Hyannis, which 
stands on the shore of the sound, as Barnstable 
village is on the shore of the Bay. As the 
Cape narrows going eastward, it came about 
that Barnstable town reaches across from one 
water to the other. 

Yarmouth in like fashion spans across from 
Bay to Sound and was contemporary with 
Barnstable in its beginnings; indeed it pre- 
ceded Barnstable a few months in the year 
1639, in being represented in the General 
Court. It was the parent town from which 
Harwich, Chatham, Dennis and Brewster were 
set off. 

The earliest of this quartet of towns to be- 
gin a life of its own was Harwich and it was 
settled, not by emigrants from Yarmouth, but 
by removals from Plymouth, Eastham and 



24 Cape Cod 

other places in 1647, Eastham being then 
known as Nauset. Harwich did not become 
a separate town until 1694 and it included 
what is now Brewster for more than one hun- 
dred years from the date of its settlement, not 
of its incorporation, for we find Brewster a 
town during the American Revolution. An 
unwelcome reminder of this to Brewster people 
is said to be the fact that this was the only 
town on the Cape that paid a demand of the 
British, for a large sum of money, in one day 
collected and paid over to the foe. 

The long-used Indian name of Nauset was 
in 1 65 1 changed by the General Court to 
Eastham, and until the settling of Harwich 
in 1694 this was the only town on the Cape 
below Yarmouth. In 1762, when Eastham 
had seen more than a century of development, 
it was the foremost town in Barnstable 
County, in population, wealth and general im- 
portance. Eastham was the parent town of 
Orleans on the south and of Wellneet and 
Truro in the north. Wellneet was set off in 
1763, and given a corporate life of its own, the 
boundary line between the two towns being 
established in 1765. 

Thus the white man, having passed in the 
autumn explorations of the Mayflower com- 
pany, from Provincetown around the inner 




MAP OF THE CAPE COD REGION 



The Pilgrims Around the Bay 25 

shore to Plymouth, was now, as the decades 
followed each other, creeping down the Cape. 
Truro, whose Indian name was Pamet, was 
settled about 1700 and to it in 1705 was 
given the name of Dangerfield. This desig- 
nation, appropriate then and as long as sail- 
ing ships held the seas, was changed to Truro 
in 1709. 

The first shall be last — might have been 
spoken of Provincetown and the rest must be 
added — the last shall be first. So late as 1714, 
it was merely a precinct of Truro, whose lands 
even now extend beyond High Head, past the 
old East Harbor to the very gateway of Prov- 
incetown. To-day the long crescent of the 
Cape's finest harbor has its thousands of peo- 
ple, and Truro has seen her population 
dwindle to a bare six hundred. The early 
days did not invite settlement on the sandy 
tip of the Cape. Whatever the Pilgrims hoped 
to achieve in the fisheries, their prime desire 
was to get their living out of the soil. This 
is the iron rule for a remote and isolated 
colony. There was no Boston market, no 
Genesee country, no expanse of prairie, no 
railway and no highway. Their quest was for 
soil, water, shelter from storm, and protection 
from the red man. This they found in Plym- 
outh and then they turned about to see 



26 Cape Cod 

where and how they could use the foreland 
which lay on this ocean side. 

Like all the rest of the Cape, the lower end, 
with its shifting dunes and beaches and the 
great curving spit that incloses the harbor, 
was under the control of the Plymouth colony, 
until all was joined to Massachusetts. Plym- 
outh ruled the early community and for a 
consideration granted fishing rights to stran- 
gers. The lands of even the village of Prov- 
incetown were long held by the Colony and 
then by the State, and not until 1893, were 
they conveyed by a special statute to the town. 
The name indicates the original relation to the 
Plymouth sovereignty. The incorporation as 
Province Town occured in 1727. While the 
Colony and Commonwealth were long to own 
the land on which the very homes stood, there 
was a measure of compensation in allowing 
that the peculiar situation of the people 
should exempt them from taxation and from 
military service. 

No town in the Pilgrim country has nobler 
hills, more fertile fields, or greater wealth of 
lovely shoreline, than Falmouth — ancient Fal- 
mouth it may be truly called; for in 1660, the 
first settlers, said to be from Barnstable, came 
along the shore of Vineyard Sound in boats, 
and landed on the edge of the outwash plain, 



The Pilgrims Around the Bay 27 

between Oyster Pond and Fresh Pond. Here 
they made their first encampment in the edge 
of flat fields, now dotted with mansions, and 
luxuriant with the flowers, hedges, lawns and 
gardens of summer residents. Thus the Fal- 
mouth pioneers were quite in the running with 
the other towns of the upper Cape. If they 
were a little off the main line of Pilgrim move- 
ment, they have well evened the scale to-day, 
with the thronged highways of the outer shore, 
the Port of Woods Hole and the ships that 
never fail the eye on Vineyard Sound. 

Here was a peculiar people, singled out from 
an ancient environment in the pursuit of an 
ideal, pushing across the seas to a remote and 
wintry wilderness, not for gain but to set up 
homes and live on the order of their conviction. 
They found a peculiar land, unlike in signifi- 
cant matters even the greater part of New 
England, having its own qualities of soil, its 
variant mantle of vegetation, its type of cli- 
mate and exposed to the sea as no other 
grounds in New England are exposed, except- 
ing only Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard, 
which are of the same piece and have gone 
with the Cape in physical unfolding. 

The Pilgrim built his house, planted his 
garden and subdued his field. On this sub- 
stratum of material support, he set up his 



28 Cape Cod 

churches and schools, developed civil govern- 
ment, converted the Indians if he could and 
fought them if he must. Rarely did he live as 
much as three miles from the ocean border, 
his environment was as truly the sea as the 
land, and he lived, as a distinguished writer 
of American history has called it, an "amphib- 
ious" life. 1 

Gradually the Old Colony man shifted his 
major activities from the land to the sea, de- 
veloped fishing and whaling on a large scale 
and built up, especially on the Cape, many 
centers of the marine industry, inaugurating 
a carrying trade that coasted the shores of the 
Americas, reached across the Atlantic Ocean 
to the ports of Europe and Africa, and found 
its remote goals in every great harbor of the 
antipodes. Truly did a venerable man of 
Sandwich in the summer that goes before this 
chronicle tell the writer, that in Singapore, 
Batavia, Melbourne, and Sidney he found men 
living that had been bred on Cape Cod. 

These sailors and ship's captains that put 
forth from Barnstable, Yarmouth, Brewster, 
Dennis, Falmouth, Chatham, Wellfleet, Truro, 
and Provincetown, learned the wide world, 
inured themselves to hardship, met the perils 
of shipwreck and filled the annals of the Cape 

1 Professor Edward Charming of Harvard University. 



The Pilgrims Around the Bay 29 

with a glory all their own. Those who re- 
mained at home tilled the small fields, brought 
in their cargoes of fish from the Bay, watched 
for the return of whalers and merchantmen, 
and went down to the shore to harvest the 
wealth that was thrown on the strand when 
unhappy mariners lost their ships in the rough 
waters of the outer' sea. 

The sand drifted over their fields, they saw 
the cliffs melt into the hungry waters, they 
put their gardens in the valleys and kettle- 
hole basins to fend off the destroying force of 
Atlantic gales. They saw the sails on the ho- 
rizon, they read the signs of the sky. When 
they had finished looking for their brethren 
who never came back they set up slabs of slate 
in their burial yards, recording the names of 
older and younger men whose bodies were 
swept on alien shores or resting on the bottom 
of the sea. Their sun rose in the sea and out 
on the Cape it set in the sea as well. They 
were on the land but scarcely of it. 

The streams of the Old Colony were few and 
short and the supply of fuel was precarious as 
the population grew and the scanty forests 
went down. There was no fuel in the ground 
save the peat which could be had only with 
excessive toil, so they set up windmills and 
ground their grist by the winds that drove 



30 Cape Cod 

their sails on the waters. And when they must 
salt their fish, they erected vats under the 
sun and drew these supplies also from the sea. 

Thus they breathed the breath of the ocean, 
found their highway on its surface and their 
living in its waters or beyond them, paid their 
good ministers with quintals of fish and with 
stranded whales, filled their corner shelves 
with shells and corals and sent the men that 
the sea did not claim to Lexington and Bunker 
Hill. 

The Cape is not like this to-day. That was 
the old Cape that Timothy Dwight described 
more than a hundred years ago, the Cape 
that Thoreau saw in his fugitive visits of 
sixty-five and seventy years ago. There was 
no railway, no wire, no steam service across 
the Bay — only sand roads and isolation. 

To-day, the man of the Cape goes by the Old 
Colony railroad, though he no longer so names 
it, and its trains are slow enough not wholly to 
destroy the repose of old time. There are 
roads of macadam and tar and thousands of 
motor cars, summer hotels, shore cottages, 
refrigerating plants, silted harbors, fishing 
specialized and localized, overseas trade long 
dead, wheat and flour and steaks and fuel from 
the continent lying behind, restricted and 
specialized agriculture, the artist colony and 



The Pilgrims Around the Bay 31 

the Portugee — such the Cape. But the sea 
is there, the surf, the dunes of the shore, the 
winter gales, the kaleidoscope colors, the sun- 
rise from Spain, and in no small measure, left 
over for the fourth Pilgrim century, the simple 
life, the frugality, kindness and honor of the 
first generation, whose descendants in the 
eighth, ninth and tenth removes, have passed 
on and paused in New York, the Mississippi 
Valley and the Pacific West. 



CHAPTER II 

THE ORIGIN OF THE CAPE 

It is a singular! ate that Cape Cod, a part of 
the oldest colony of New England, is hardly 
better known on its physical side than the 
coast of Labrador. Vague notions prevail of 
its surface, its shorelines and its origin. Its 
rocks and its soils are the victims of observa- 
tions fantastically untrue, and its relations to 
the glacial invasion have tripped up many 
writers, who in their zestful appreciation of 
the human side of the Cape have desired not 
to neglect its prehistoric foundations. 

Freeman, in the Falmouth chapter of his 
history of Cape Cod, refers to "A plentiful 
supply of granite from which exportations are 
sometimes made." This must have been read 
by another good minister, who, on the occasion 
of the two hundredth anniversary of the town 
of Falmouth prayed — "May its hills which 
Thou hast made of granite be utilized for im- 
provements and its waters be filled with the 
tribes of the sea." We may believe that the 

32 



The Origin of the Cape 33 

second of these devout petitions was answered, 
and we may pardon the hazy notions of the geol- 
ogy, as we must those of a later writer who 
says truly enough of Sandwich that there is 
plenty of rock in the landscape but proceeds 
to say also that "it is the backbone of the 
Cape jutting through." This invites a rather 
useful observation at the outset. Underneath 
the soils and glacial drift of many regions of 
our continent, under the subsoils everywhere, 
and even under all of the sea floor, is what 
the geologist knows as bedrock, the more con- 
solidated and compact earth material which 
makes up most of the earth's crust. There 
is no bedrock to be seen on the Cape, or on 
that part of the mainland in Plymouth County 
from which the Cape springs. It is not to be 
found in any seacliff , by any lake shore, or in 
any roadside ledge. There are no stone 
quarries, and no boring has ever gone deep 
enough in this region to pierce the loose-tex- 
tured earth waste and find the solid founda- 
tion below it. We may locate Brant Rock, on 
the south shore of the town of Marshfield; 
then draw a line southward reaching Buzzards 
Bay at some point between the villages of 
Wareham and Onset, and having fixed this 
line in our minds, we shall find no bedrock 
east of it in that part of Plymouth County ; or 



34 Cape Cod 

in the whole of Barnstable County, which is 
the Cape. The rock is under the surface, but 
how far under, we do not know. Hard rocks 
are there in plenty, in surface fragments, in 
stones little and big, but these recite another 
story. 

Outside of papers of a learned sort, in jour- 
nals and reports of surveys, nobody has told 
us where the glaciers were, to which so much 
is credited, or how big they were, or whither 
they moved, or how they were the means of 
accumulating the mass of land waste that we 
call the Cape. 

Here let a devotee of earth science put in a 
mild protest against further emphasis on cer- 
tain analogies drawn from parts of the human 
form. Rather vivid they were when first used 
by a literary genius, compounding in himself 
the naturalist and the philosopher, but weari- 
some and trite after being solemnly quoted and 
paraded in every book or light essay on the 
Cape for some fifty years or more. We may 
learn more, and do the imagination no violence 
if we find other ways in which to describe the 
curving shores and the hilly relief of this 
foreland. 

One writer, with painful ingenuity, finds 
here a "vast curling whiplash," and we are 
compelled to look at the giant who had 



The Origin of the Cape 35 

"whirled it about his head and dropped it 
into the sea." We can afford, without loss to 
fancy or poetic feeling, to drop these fantastic 
and crude ways of picturing geographic forms, 
which too easily are a screen for our geographic 
ignorance. When we have put the Cape's end 
into a class with Rockaway and Sandy Hook, 
and have followed them in the making, we 
shall not lose any of nature's idealism if we 
learn to call them hooked spits, and we shall 
have gained some real and unf orgetable knowl- 
edge of that marvelous zone where sea and 
land meet. 

The eastern part of Plymouth County, bor- 
dering Cape Cod Bay and reaching across to 
the head of Buzzards Bay is a piece of country 
quite like Cape Cod in surface, in soil, in its 
vegetation, in its physical evolution and in its 
human story. From this Plymouth belt there 
springs out into the sea from the vicinity of 
the Canal, the Cape, southward to Woods 
Hole, eastward to Chatham, then northward 
to Provincetown — in all if we follow the gen- 
eral course of the outer shore, a distance of 
about one hundred miles: if we follow the 
inner shore, about fifty miles. The Cape is 
wide on the west, but narrows as we go east- 
ward and still more toward the north, until it 
offers about the northern end an exposure to 



36 Cape Cod 

the sea which is unique on the mainland of 
the North American continent. 

Along the Canal and the eastern shore of 
Buzzards Bay, Cape Cod is more than twenty- 
miles wide. Such is the span from Cape Cod 
Bay to the end of Penzance, pointing toward 
the chain of the Elizabeth Islands. From the 
town of Barnstable eastward the width is from 
six to eight miles, though in places the reach 
from tide to tide is much less . On the northern 
extension of the Cape, the average is four or five 
miles northward into Wellfleet, with a drop to 
two miles at North Truro and less than a mile 
as we approach the village of Provincetown. 

How little such figures tell about the Cape, 
is revealed by any good map which shows the 
ins and outs of the shoreline. If we should go 
over from the head of Bass River, to the 
nearest tidal run into the Bay, the portage 
would be little more than a mile long. And if 
in Truro, we should follow the tidal channel 
of what by custom is known as the Pamet 
River, a few steps would take us over a ridge 
of dune sand to the Atlantic Ocean. Bradford 
in his history of the Plymouth Plantation re- 
counts the going to the rescue of a British 
ship in 1627, crossing the Cape by a portage 
a little more than two miles long from the head 
of Namskaket Creek in the town of Orleans. 



The Origin of the Cape 37 

There is no precise use of language in taking 
the whole of the venerable County of Barn- 
stable, which is no inconsiderable part of the 
State of Massachusetts, and calling it a cape. 
By all the proprieties of geography, it is, and 
we suppose should be called, a peninsula. But 
who would have it so? Rather do we yield to 
the authority of three centuries of use, and 
call it with the millions who know this as his- 
toric ground, by the name, as short as it is 
simple and full of meaning — Cape Cod. 

Back of Plymouth lies a range of hills, which 
carries the eye southward, with forested slopes 
and crests, along the Bay shore to the Canal. 
At the Canal there is a break, but no discon- 
tinuance. Crossing the narrow and steep- 
sided natural valley that now sees the passing 
of ships, the hills continue southward and also 
eastward. To the south, the hill belt, three 
to four miles in width, extends to Woods Hole. 
Monument Beach, Cataumet, North Falmouth, 
and West Falmouth, all centers of summer life, 
lie in its western fringe, where the forests give 
way and the slopes lead down to the innumer- 
able coves and beaches of the Buzzards Bay 
shore. Woods Hole is at the southern end and 
Falmouth on its lovely plain lies at the eastern 
base of this imposing moraine. 

Eastward from the Canal the hills run 



38 Cape Cod 

through the northern parts of Sandwich, Barn- 
stable, Yarmouth, Dennis and Brewster, into 
Orleans, or rather across Orleans to the open 
sea. This range of uneven upland lies near 
the Bay shore, leaving room for a string of 
villages and for farm lands of modest extent, 
for the north-shore state road, and for the 
railway as far east as Yarmouth. Yet all this 
needs to be put a little differently, for most of 
road and railway is to be found among the 
northern foothills or near the northern edge 
of the moraine, for moraine it is, accumulated 
on the rim of a wide lobe of ice that lay where 
Cape Cod Bay and Massachusetts Bay now 
are. At many points the moraine stops where 
the tide marshes begin and the traveler, eager 
for every glimpse of the blue waters is tanta- 
lized by finding himself lost among scrubby 
forests. 

Hills and mountains are low or high accord- 
ing to their surroundings. Hence Bourne 
Hill in Sandwich, rising nearly three hundred 
feet above the sea, is the monarch of the Cape. 
Then there is Shoot Flying Hill in Barnstable, 
said to have its name from being a good place 
to shoot wild fowl as they migrated between 
the Bay and the Sound. Scargo Hill sur- 
mounted by a tower is in Dennis, being an- 
other hill of the great moraine and a welcome 



The Origin of the Cape 39 

beacon to thousands of sailors bringing their 
craft from distant seas to the harbors of 
Barnstable, Yarmouth, Dennis and Brewster. 

Higher than any of these is the master ele- 
vation of Plymouth, Manomet Hill, the cul- 
minating part of the Plymouth moraine, the 
greatest landmark between the Blue Hills of 
Milton and the Cape Cod Canal. 

If we follow the moraine from Falmouth 
northward until it bends eastward in Sand- 
wich, we shall find on the inner side a plain, 
springing from the base of the hills at about 
two hundred feet above the sea. This plain 
slopes southward toward Vineyard Sound. As 
we go eastward into Barnstable the hills are 
lower, and likewise the northern edge of the 
plain, which is here about one hundred feet 
in altitude. A little farther east, at Yarmouth 
Camp Grounds, the measure is only forty or 
fifty feet. 

The relation of moraine and plain are per- 
fectly seen at the Camp Ground. The cot- 
tages are on the northern border of the plain, 
and directly northward rise the hills, which 
the railway and the highway cross for a mile 
or more to Yarmouth Station. Three miles 
south are Hyannis and the head of Lewis Bay. 
Everywhere the plain slopes, imperceptibly to 
the eye, toward Vineyard and Nantucket 



40 Cape Cod 

Sounds. In the shoreward belt, where the 
plain is cut by inlets of the sea, are Falmouth, 
Cotuit, Centerville, Hyannis and various Yar- 
mouths, Dennises, Harwiches and Chathams, 
all villages of the south shore. 

From Falmouth to Chatham, between the 
moraine and the sound, lies this gently slant- 
ing surface, known to glacialists as an outwash 
plain. When waters flow out at the lower end 
of a glacier in a mountain valley they spread 
their ample load of sands and clays in a narrow 
belt down the valley. When an ice sheet 
spreads out on rather even ground, streams 
come out at many places from under its frontal 
edge. They grade up the ground in front of 
the glacier ; they change their points of outflow 
and their courses below the outflow. They run 
into each other in braided and tangled pat- 
terns, but all in all, construct a sloping plain 
of outwash. This is what happened on the 
Cape, with ice in Cape Cod Bay and ice in 
Buzzards Bay — ice that reached far northward 
and kept pushing southward, and the melting 
never ceased while the ice endured, and the 
morainic hills were built and the frontal plain 
was spread and the upper Cape began to take 
shape; a shape which is little changed, and its 
appearance would be little changed, if the 
mantle of herb and forest were stripped away. 



The Origin of the Cape 4 1 

Within the outwash plain are the basins of 
scores of lakes and ponds of various sizes and 
shapes, with forested shores, sandy beaches 
and a wealth of natural beauty which in later 
years has been in process of discovery. In not 
a few places the plain is pitted with dry de- 
pressions, or kettle holes, whose origin is the 
same as that of the lake basins. Whether a 
lake is found in such a depression depends on 
the supply of water and the porosity or open 
texture of the subsoil. Gathering in a single 
sentence the forms of the upper part of the 
Cape — it has a northern section or axis of 
moraine, and a wide, sloping plain on the 
south, while on every shore, north, south, east 
and west, is a fringe of coast marshes and bays 
and tidal runs. 

In the town of Orleans, there begin as we 
go north, those rather low and dreary levels 
known as the plains of Nauset in the town of 
Eastham. The traveler by the railway or in 
his motor car looks out upon this monotonous 
and half-desert vista and wonders if he has 
exhausted the natural scenery of the Cape. 
And his wonder grows when he is told that 
Indian corn was formerly raised there for out- 
side trade, and that a couple of decades after 
the landing of the Mayflower people there was 
a serious project to transplant the whole 



A 2 Cape Cod 

Plymouth colony to this flat and sea-girt 
ground. 

As we approach Wellfleet the surface rises 
and through Wellfleet to High Head in Truro 
we find higher and hilly ground, with more 
forests, plentiful lakes and new surprises at 
each turn of the ever- winding highway. The 
physiographer speaks of these grounds as high 
plains, for he discovers, at altitudes varying 
from eighty to about one hundred and forty 
feet, enough harmony in the upper levels to 
warrant the name of plains. A plodding walk- 
er, however, without a relief map or a wide 
view, would call it very broken and hilly 
ground. 

Here the Cape is higher in the south and 
east, or on the ocean side, and lower on the 
west and north, on the Bay side. Into the 
mass of loose glacial waste the Atlantic, un- 
hindered and powerful, has cut its way and has 
fashioned here the noblest cliffs on the Cape, 
cliffs that begin in Orleans, and run northward 
beyond Highland Light to High Head in 
Truro. Here the waves of every winter and 
even the lashings of summer storms work on 
the cliffs, shift their materials along the shore 
and out to sea, and slowly move their crest 
lines westward. 

Running across the Cape from east to west, 



The Origin of the Cape 43 

in this region of high and broken plains are 
almost a dozen valleys, a mile or two apart, 
parallel to each other and having floors that 
slope toward Cape Cod Bay. One of the 
deepest and widest of these is threaded by 
that tidal water known as Pamet River, which 
heads eastward at Pamet Life Saving Station 
and Balls ton Beach. But for the shoreline 
bar at that point, topped by dune sands, the 
Pamet channel would join the Bay to the ocean 
and set off all the northern stretch of Cape Cod 
as an island. This valley was the limit of the 
first excursion of Standish and his company 
from the Mayflower in Provincetown harbor, 
and marks the first discovery of a supply of 
corn. 

Northward from Pamet are Longnook, a 
vale of gentle seclusion, not seen by the run- 
ning tourist, and a little valley that begins on 
the golf grounds of Highland Light and comes 
out in the village of North Truro. It is the 
"Mosquito Hollow" of the golfer, who often 
has more to do than follow his ball from the 
sixth to the eighth hole. Southward from 
Pamet one of the loveliest of these valleys is 
Cahoon's Hollow east of Wellfleet. It is bor- 
dered by pine forests and transparent lakes 
and through those forests and around those 
lakes one may pass on hard sand roads, uphill 



44 Cape Cod 

and downhill in quiet shades, that seem as 
remote for the hour as the forest depths of 
Maine or northern Wisconsin. It is such 
places that are not seen from cars that whirl 
over the tar-faced road at thirty miles an hour. 
The traveler who has rushed along the south 
shore road, shot down the main artery to 
Provincetown, and returned to Boston by 
Brewster, Barnstable and Sandwich — he has 
done well, but let him not suppose he has seen 
the Cape. 

Some old libraries in New England can pro- 
duce a time-stained and limp pamphlet of 
about a dozen pages, by a Member of the 
Humane Society. The title is "A Description 
of the Eastern Coast" and the writer was the 
Reverend James Freeman. Its object was to 
locate for the shipwrecked sailor, the refuge 
huts erected by the Humane Society, and in 
this humble booklet is a careful description of 
this group of parallel valleys, of the very exist- 
ence of which modern books and essays about 
the Cape give no hint. The most southerly 
channel is Plum Valley in Eastham. It is easy 
to see why this valley is thus named, and it 
is a fairly safe guess that most of the others 
would reveal the shrubby growths, the cluster- 
ing colors and the wild flavor of the beach 
plum. 



The Origin of the Cape 45 

At High Head in Truro, we drop down to 
the beaches, marshes and sand dunes of the 
Provincelands, and let us anticipate our story 
to say that all below and beyond High Head 
is the product of forces working after the ice 
of the glacial period was gone — the creation 
of currents, waves and winds — ten square 
miles of fascinating country that is new, ac- 
cording to the geologist's ways of counting age. 

High Head is flanked on either side by salt 
marshes — as they were in the old days — fresh 
marshes now : for the long beach toward Prov- 
incetown, built and almost completed by na- 
ture, was finished by man, shutting out the 
salt water, and furnishing a level track for the 
railway and the highway, both of which de- 
scend from the glacial highlands, at the pump- 
ing station near the inner shore. The great 
dune ridges carry the Cape around to the west, 
and springing from them is the hooked spit 
which by its spiral curve forms the harbor 
of Provincetown. 

Going westward across the Bay, Plymouth on 
its harbor, nestles in the eastern slopes of an- 
other great moraine mass, which rises westward 
and extends southward, inclosing many lakes, 
and covered with woodland almost unbroken 
save for the sad-looking trunks and tops of 
the oaks ravaged by the gypsy moth. Going 



46 Cape Cod 

southward the moraine culminates in Mano- 
met Hill, 394 feet, higher by about a hundred 
feet than any hill on the Cape itself. This 
great mass, and the high ground reaching 
southward through the town of Plymouth 
into Bourne, has been attacked by the waves 
of the Bay, and the results are seen in the 
boulder pavements of its beaches and in the 
cliffs that rise above them. 

Edward Hitchcock was the distinguished 
President of Amherst College. He was also 
one of the great geologists in the earlier days 
of that science and about seventy years ago 
he put forth a report on the geology of Massa- 
chusetts, in two quarto volumes. He did not 
in this classic document venture much about 
Cape Cod, but he had an open and fertile 
mind, he had been reading Agassiz and Sir 
Charles Lyell, and had gained some knowledge 
of the startling glacial theory with which these 
men had set Europe thinking. Hitchcock 
pondered what he had seen on the Cape and 
put a postscript into his preface, including this 
remarkable paragraph. 

"Is it possible that the whole of Cape Cod 
is nothing but a vast terminal moraine, pro- 
duced by a glacier advancing through Massa- 
chusetts Bay and scooping out the materials 
that now form the Cape? In this case the 




qq66 



The Origin of the Cape 47 

moraines at Plymouth and Truro would form 
a part of the lateral moraines, and probably 
most of Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard 
might be regarded as moraines of the same 
glacier, when it extended farther south." 

In a time when ice sheets were subjects for 
confused wonderment, much ignorance and 
some skepticism, this may almost be called an 
utterance of genius, for we, with the harvest 
of a thousand workers gathered in our hand, 
can ill appreciate the grasp, we might say, the 
daring of this great observer. It is no special 
credit to the physiographer of to-day that he 
is able to go into further explanation and to 
correct in some particulars the interpretation 
of Dr. Hitchcock. 

Making sure of main facts — the reader prob- 
ably knows that one of the great centers of 
ice movement in North America was in the 
Labrador peninsula, east of Hudson Bay. 
There centered an ice sheet known to glacial 
students as the Laurentian or Labrador flow. 
From that central region moved the ice south- 
ward and south westward into New York, 
Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana and other States. 
Over New England, the flow, crossing the 
St. Lawrence Valley, was to the southeast, 
and the ice was thick enough and powerful 
enough to push diagonally across the north 



48 Cape Cod 

and south mountain ranges of western New 
England. 

In southeastern New England the move- 
ment of the ice was more nearly south by- 
southeast. Thus from the highlands of north- 
ern and central New England the ice pushed 
outward into the edge of the sea, or at least 
into regions that are now covered by the waters 
of the ocean. From grounds farther north 
these ice flows passed over Massachusetts, 
Rhode Island and Connecticut. 

So far as is known, the extreme reach of 
the ice in the south extended to Nantucket, 
Martha's vineyard, Block Island and Long 
Island. Terminal moraines have long been 
recognized as crossing these islands, in the hills 
of the northern parts of Nantucket and 
Martha's Vineyard, and in a double series 
running from east to west on Long Island. 
And south of each moraine belt of hills, the 
outwash plains are as evident as they are on 
Cape Cod. As on the Cape, the surface of the 
moraines shows fragments great and small, of 
bed rocks whose place of origin was dozens or 
hundreds of miles away in New England or 
in Canada. 

When the ice began to melt at its front 
faster than it advanced, or when as we say, 
the ice retreated, it by and by assumed new 



The Origin of the Cape 49 

frontal lines. These new fronts are likewise 
indicated by belts of moraine, as in southern 
Rhode Island, in the chain of the Elizabeth 
Islands, and in the great moraine which skirts 
Cape Cod Bay on its south shore, the moraine 
which runs from Bourne and Sandwich to the 
ocean side of Orleans. 

It is an open question still, whether this 
retreat stopped on these lines of mainland 
moraine, or reached much farther north, to 
be followed by a new advance to the position 
of the moraine belts. Thus we recognize the 
fact that the glacial invasion was neither 
simple, nor of short duration, but was, as has 
been well shown in recent years, complicated, 
prolonged, and marked by several great ad- 
vances of the icy mantle. 

For the reader of these pages another bit of 
explanatory warning may not be without 
value. When we speak of an ice movement 
from a remote part of Canada, we do not mean 
that all the ice came from that center of move- 
ment. Throughout the ice period New Eng- 
land had its snowstorms and its moisture- 
laden air and thus made large contributions 
to the New England ice sheet. The central 
push and the direction of flow were in a way 
fixed in this northern region for reasons not 
altogether simple and not wholly known. But 



50 Cape Cod 

the ice that reached Nantucket or Barnstable 
County was no doubt mainly a product of 
New England. 

We have referred to glacial ice as sometimes 
moving in lobate masses. How a "lobe" of 
ice behaves, it may be well to explain. We 
may take the basin of Lake Michigan as an 
example. Without much doubt, pre-glacial 
time saw a valley, where the lake now is. The 
ice entered this valley from the north, followed 
it southward and spread out in it. The central 
flow kept its way southward, but the side 
movements turned westward into Wisconsin 
and eastward into Michigan. Thus the lines 
of flow were somewhat on the pattern of the 
lines of a feather, or, to venture a technical 
word which has the authority of a distin- 
guished scholar, the flow of a lobe of ice is 
"axi-radiant " — it flows in the direction of 
an axis, but radiates in right and left di- 
rections. 

The ice behaved in like fashion as it pushed 
from the St. Lawrence Valley, through the 
Champlain and Hudson Valleys. Now apply 
the notion to Cape Cod Bay. The ice pushed 
southward to its edge in Sandwich, Barnstable, 
and the other towns, and it pushed outward 
and westward in the Duxbury-Plymouth re- 
gion : and outward and eastward in the region 



The Origin of the Cape 5 1 

of the lower cape from Orleans to High Head 
in Truro. 

On the west of the ice sheet of Cape Cod 
Bay lay another body of ice known as the 
Buzzards Bay lobe. Along this belt of terri- 
tory the retreat from the earlier front on 
Martha's Vineyard is marked by the Elizabeth 
Islands, which constitute a moraine parallel 
to much of the morainic belt on Martha's 
Vineyard. At that stage the ice moving from 
far northward still held possession of the sur- 
face now covered by the waters of Buzzards 
Bay. 

Now we have two great fanlike bodies of 
ice lying against each other, along the north 
and south line of the Plymouth Hills. These 
hills form a moraine between the two lobes 
and are therefore an interlobate moraine, a 
form of which the glacial-hill belts of our 
North Central States offer many examples. 
The irregular heaps of material that lie behind 
Plymouth and south of it, received contribu- 
tions from the pushing ice and outflowing 
waters from east and west. Late in the history 
of such ice lobes the ice ceases to move, or is 
stagnant, its edges are often covered with rock 
waste, and when finally the ice melts out, the 
waste sinks and slides to stable positions, and the 
tumbled hills of the Plymouth type are evolved. 



52 Cape Cod 

May we now go back to the retreat of the 
glacier from Nantucket to the inner curve of 
the Cape and see other changes that hap- 
pened? Much of the older ice that lay on 
what is now the upper, wide section of the 
Cape, became stagnant and large blocks were 
covered by earthy waste brought by outflow- 
ing streams from the still existing Cape Cod 
Bay glacier. Precisely this condition may be 
followed for many miles on the front part of 
the Malaspina Glacier in Alaska at the present 
time. Even forests there grow on glacial waste 
which in turn is supported by ice. So, on the 
Cape, these dead and buried blocks of ice in 
time melted beneath their cover, let down the 
covering materials and formed the pockets or 
kettle holes in which nestle the innumerable 
lakes which dot everywhere the upper Cape. 

Now we have brought to a degree of com- 
pleteness the story of the great plain of the 
southern part of the Cape, with its forests, its 
fields of scrub, and its isolated clearings and 
hamlets. It was built by many changing 
streams flowing from the glacier of the Bay, 
and later was pitted by ice-block holes. The 
ground water filtered in and barring some re- 
cent changes of a minor character, the topog- 
raphy was complete, and we behold the mar- 
velous beauty of Mashpee, Santuit, Spec- 



The Origin of the Cape 53 

tacle, Triangle and Lawrence, Cotuit, We- 
quaket, the various "Long" ponds, and of 
scores of others great and small, with their 
blue waters, sandy shores and frames of leafy 
green. 

Some streams of glacial waters, flowing 
down the outwash plain, excavated shallow 
and flat-floored channels along their lower 
courses. This is notably true in the southern 
part of the town of Falmouth, as it is on the 
southern plains of Martha's Vineyard and 
Nantucket. The upper reaches of these chan- 
nels are in some cases followed now by the 
outlets of lakes, Mashpee River being an exam- 
ple. In other cases these valleys are dry or 
merely swampy, the flat floors being bordered 
by steep sides. Into the southern parts of the 
channels, sea water has entered, making them 
into marine bays. In a number of instances 
on the Cape and on the islands these bays have 
been turned into fresh lakes by the building of 
shore bars across their openings. 1 

1 Note. At least seven of these valleys ending in bays may 
be counted from Falmouth Harbor to Menauhant or a little 
beyond. They are, from west to east, (i) Bowman's Pond, now 
Falmouth Harbor, leading north by several small ponds to Long 
Pond, which is deeply recessed, into the Falmouth Moraine; (2) 
Little Pond, with a dry valley extending about three miles north- 
ward; (3) Great Pond, which is tidal about four miles and may 
be traced to three miles north of Hatchville, or nine miles from 
Vineyard Sound; (4) Green Pond, with water, tidal marsh, and 



54 Cape Cod 

There is a considerable amount of evidence 
that points to the existence of a vast glacier 
lying east of the Cape. If any reader is given 
to the idea that geologists deal much in theory 
he is likely to be startled by a proposal to 
invade with ice the Atlantic domain for a hun- 
dred miles and more beyond a strip of remote 
foreland that is already embosomed by the sea. 
But here are the facts with which we have to 
deal. We know that the continental glacier 
scored heavily the shore parts of Maine and 
moved out for an unknown distance where now 
is sea. Mount Desert is fifteen hundred feet 
high, stands on the sea border and was freely 
overridden by ice. This means a large invasion 
of the present sea territory on the south. We 
know also that the land was higher than now, 
causing wide recession of the sea to the south- 
ward. 

These facts open possibilities. Over to the 
southeast of the Cape are those threatening 
and dangerous Nantucket shoals, which turned 
back the Mayflower, and have for centuries 

dry valley extending in all six miles; (5) Bowers Pond, with a 
dry valley heading over six miles from the sea; (6) A double- 
headed channel running north from Menauhant, the eastern arm 
of the bay heading at Waquoit, then up Child's River to John 
Pond, seven miles from the sea. These flat-floored valleys are 
in a number of places strikingly adapted to cranberry culture, 
having a natural grade and being readily flooded. 



The Origin of the Cape 55 

put the shipmaster on his mettle, if they did 
not lure him to his grave. Farther east, from 
a hundred to a hundred and forty miles dis- 
tant, are other reefs and shallow waters, of 
what is known as St. George's Shoals. There 
is a story of a ship's crew playing baseball on 
a shoal bared at low tide. True or false, the 
yarn serves to fix in the memory this feature 
of our Atlantic waters. The Nantucket and 
St. George's Shoals appear much like sub- 
merged terminal moraines. 

Let the reader now recall those east by 
west channels in Wellfleet and Truro, to which 
we have perhaps seemed to give needless em- 
phasis. Their floors descend from east to west. 
They were made by streams of water. Those 
streams must have flowed from east to west. 
They could not have had their sources in the 
ocean. Whence did they come? 

Put all our facts together ; or rather — set up 
a hypothesis and see if it fits the facts. Pro- 
ject a vast ice sheet over Maine, through the 
Gulf of Maine from Massachusetts to Nova 
Scotia, and southward. We know the glacier 
moved far south from the Maine shoreline of 
to-day. We know wide sea bottoms were then 
above sea-level. We know that St. George's 
and Nantucket Shoals may well stand as the 
terminal accumulations of such an ice sheet. 



56 Cape Cod 

And we know that the waters from that sheet 
as it melted would flow out on the west, in a 
manner suited to the making of the cross 
channels on the lower Cape. Perhaps we have 
gone too far in uncovering the method, being 
reluctant simply to assert, what on its face, 
unexplained, might seem an extravagant guess. 
But it is more than guess, it is a fairly fortified 
conclusion ; and if true it means that the lower 
Cape, from Orleans or Chatham to Truro is 
an interlobate moraine between the " South 
Channel" glacier and the Cape Cod Bay gla- 
cier as the Plymouth belt of hills is interlobate 
between the glaciers of Cape Cod and Buz- 
zards Bays. 

It is believed that the smaller lobate ice 
sheets on the west were the first to melt away. 
As the retirement of the Buzzards Bay gla- 
cier left that region open, the waters from the 
waning Cape Cod Bay glacier spilled across 
the base ot the Cape and excavated that 
natural valley which is now followed by the 
Canal. Later, as the ice in Cape Cod Bay 
waned, the waters from the South Channel 
glacier swept across the lower Cape, dug the 
valleys already described, and shaped the 
broad plains of Nauset with their wandering 
outflows. 

For the sake of clearness we have kept in 



The Origin of the Cape 57 

the background the fact that the glacial his- 
tory of the Cape is not so simple as it might 
appear. We have been dealing with what is 
known to glacialists as the Wisconsin invasion, 
which was the latest of several great episodes 
of the glacial period taken as a whole. With 
greater or less depth these later deposits cover 
most of the Cape, but below these more recent 
accumulations, are exposed older beds of clay, 
sand and gravel, belonging to earlier invasions 
or to interglacial intervals. 

These older deposits are revealed by borings, 
as for wells; in some of the shore cliffs, and in 
clay pits, such as are found at the brick yards 
of West Barnstable. Many visitors have seen 
these older deposits in the splendid cliffs at 
Highland Light. Most conspicuous are the 
massive and tough clays, known there as the 
Clay Pounds, as they stand carved by wave 
and rain wash into the spurs and gullies which 
give to the great amphitheater there such an 
aspect of wild nature. Below these clays and 
above the recent sands of the beach, the ob- 
servant visitor will see basal spurs of coarse 
gravel, so old that the pebbles are cemented 
into a conglomerate and rusted with the leach- 
ing and oxidation to which the materials have 
long been subject. It may be well believed, 
indeed, that the time that passed between the 



58 Cape Cod 

deposit of these gravels, and the making of the 
later moraines of the Cape, was many times 
longer than the span that brings us from the 
later ice to the present time. 

Few results of the glacial invasion, first and 
last, have raised so many queries as the erratic 
masses of rock that are found far from their 
parent beds. Such drift boulders are conspicu- 
ous on many parts of the Cape, especially on 
the heights and slopes of the morainic ridges. 
They are common on the great hill belt from 
Falmouth to Sandwich and from Sandwich to 
Orleans, and on the inner or northern slopes of 
the latter section. This is what the glacialist 
calls the ice-contact, that is the slope that 
faced the ice as it melted away in retreat. 

"Bear-den" patches of great boulders occur 
in the hill forests of the Beebe estate west of 
Falmouth village and such a bunching of 
boulders in Pocasset is locally known as the 
Devil's Den. Enos rock on the Nauset mo- 
raine in Eastham is thirty-four feet long. A 
boulder ten or twelve feet long lies by the 
roadside on the right as one approaches High- 
land Light and from it the adjacent hotel cot- 
tage is called "The Rock." From these sup- 
plies of the coarser drift must have been taken 
the granite "for exportation" as described by 
the annalist of Falmouth. Myriads of smaller 



The Origin of the Cape 59 

pieces lie in the gravels everywhere, migrants 
from the region of the Merrimac, from all 
northern New England, and from the founda- 
tions of eastern Canada. 

The shortest journey on the Cape flashes on 
the eye a vision of blue waters framed in 
forest green. Back from the ocean, nothing 
else is so characteristic of the Cape as its lakes, 
and this is equally true of all of the Old Colony 
which lies in Plymouth County. Someone 
has said that one could, in the town of Plym- 
outh, camp by a different lake every night 
in the year. This can hardly be true, but if 
county instead of town were named, it could 
probably be done. The topographic map, 
drawn with contours for altitude and showing 
the country on a scale of one inch to the mile, 
records one hundred and twenty-three lakes 
in the town of Plymouth and it is quite certain 
that the topographer missed some of the 
smaller ponds, hidden as they commonly are, 
by a complete encirclement of forest. 

On the Cape, the same maps show two 
hundred and seventy natural lakes and ponds. 
They have the greatest variety in size, shape, 
depth, in their shore forms, the vegetation of 
their borders and the life of their waters. 
One of the largest is Long Pond in Harwich, 
with a maximum depth of 66 feet and an area 



6o Cape Cod 

of more than a square mile. There is no place 
on Cape Cod, perhaps, which rivals the neigh- 
borhood of the Pleasant Lake railway station 
in revealing the abundance and beauty of 
these unsalted waters. Let the traveler as he 
goes north from Harwich station watch for the 
place where he gets the vistas, losing them all 
too soon, of Long Pond on the right and 
Hinkleys and Seymour Ponds on the left, com- 
pensating him in a measure for those longer 
stretches of railway travel in which he is hid- 
den among morainic hills, while he looks in 
vain for the sea. Indeed we have thought of 
the Cape as so narrow and wave-beaten, 
that coming for the first time into it, we 
are astonished to find that it has an interior 
and forest spaces that seem as interminable 
as one might find in any other part of New 
England. 

Another of the greater fresh-waters of the 
Cape is Great Pond in the town of Barnstable. 
To add to its attraction, this name has been 
superseded by Wequaket, which has a family 
resemblance to many other Indian names on 
the Cape. Whether a lobster dinner is more 
to be enjoyed on the shore because of the new 
name, we do not know. The lake lies in the 
northern edge of the outwash plain and from 
its northern shore rise the hills of the great 



The Origin of the Cape 61 

moraine where on the north are the Great 
Marshes of Barnstable. 

There is no lake, larger or smaller, which is 
more beautiful than Mashpee. It is deeply- 
set in the outwash plain and fine forests rise 
on its borders, save where in two or three 
places a farmer in early days has cleared the 
slopes for meadow, or found a low pocket for 
a cranberry bog. The old Indian town never 
had many people and has but about three 
hundred now, and this sparseness of the de- 
structive human animal may explain the 
seclusion which the lake has preserved. Into 
the lake from the east runs a wooded promon- 
tory which almost cuts it into two waters, and 
indeed the northern part is known as Wakeby 
Lake. This promontory is said to belong to 
the President of Harvard College and there 
could be no lovelier mingling of water and 
forest. 

Where the highway crosses the outlet 
stream, an eighth of a mile below the lake, is 
the Hotel Attaquin, a plain two-story road 
house, where Grover Cleveland, Joseph Jeffer- 
son, and Daniel Webster in his time, found 
wholesome food, and a decent bed, and much 
good converse, when they were tempting the 
bass of the lake and the trout of the neighbor- 
ing brooks. 



62 Cape Cod 

Most of the Cape lakes are shallow, for the 
depths already recorded are slight for waters 
that are so large. The smaller Cliff Pond in 
East Brewster shows a depth of eighty-one 
feet. The cliffs for which it is named rise more 
than one hundred feet from some of its shores, 
and thus show that the ice-block kettle is at 
least two hundred feet deep, from the bottom 
of the water to the top of the adjoining upland. 

In much the greater number, the lakes are 
of glacial origin. Some low areas that held 
lakes at the close of the glacial time now show 
only bogs, because wash from the surrounding 
lands and the accumulations of aquatic vege- 
tation have filled the shallow basins of the old 
time. In other cases, the bays of the larger 
lakes have been made into separate ponds by 
the growth of barrier beaches, obstructing 
shallow passages at the mouth of small arms 
of the lakes. 

A few lakes, particularly back of Province- 
town, lie among the sand dunes, and their 
shallow basins result from the accumulation 
of sand hills around small areas which escape 
the sand deluge. Perhaps two or three dozen 
ponds can be found on the shores of the Cape 
which were formerly arms of the sea. They 
have been isolated from the salt water by the 
growth of spits and barrier beaches. They are 



The Origin of the Cape 63 

then replenished year by year by fresh water 
falling on their surfaces and leaching into them 
from the adjoining lands, while the original 
salts are lost to them by equally gradual 
movements of the ground waters. Oyster 
Pond, by whose shores the first settlers came 
to Falmouth, is such a lake, and several bays 
of the sea border of Falmouth have had a like 
history. Such changes go on from year to 
year, and any season may show another bay 
shut off as a pond, or unstable conditions of 
alternation may prevail until the cutting off 
is complete. 

The old East Harbor in Truro, near Prov- 
incetown, had still withstood the closing pro- 
cess of nature when in the last century man 
completed the barrier which nature had far 
advanced in construction, and thus freshened 
this shallow water which everyone sees on his 
right, as he approaches the dunes at the door 
of Provincetown. At the southern end of 
Monomoy is Powder Hole, once a harbor fre- 
quented by ships, now landlocked and wel- 
coming the travelers of the sea no more. 

Quite by contraries, a few marine bays on 
the Cape shore were once occupied by fresh 
waters. These waters lay in morainic kettles, 
with a slight and frail barrier of drift separat- 
ing them from the sea. The waves have re- 



64 Cape Cod 

moved the barrier and let in the ocean. No 
better example can be found than the lovely 
Quisset Harbor on the Buzzards Bay shore of 
Falmouth. Stage Harbor and Oyster Pond 
in Chatham, and Lewis Bay by Hyannis are 
doubtless in ice-block holes, but may never 
have been landlocked. 

The beauty of the lakes can never be greater 
than in the past days of wild seclusion, but 
their usefulness is likely to grow, as the Cape 
fills and the summer person goes afield for a 
refuge. They will be increasingly useful as 
sources of pure water, or of ice when the win- 
ters are cold enough to form it, and as reser- 
voirs for power, in the few cases where suffi- 
cient altitude and the presence of an outlet 
stream make this use possible. In not a few 
places, the lake waters are pumped to flood 
the cranberry bogs whose grades are higher 
than those of the lakes. 

The irregularities of glacial deposition have 
not only produced lake basins, but have so 
impeded drainage as to bring many fresh- water 
marshes into being. Hence the Old Colony 
country abounds in boggy areas, with their 
peculiar groupings of vegetation, and their 
changing conditions. Such marshes abound in 
the southern parts of Dennis and Harwich — 
indeed, in the southern part of the Cape, the 



The Origin of the Cape 65 

extent of cranberry culture is a clear index of 
the frequency of these undrained areas. The 
physical history has been favorable to the 
existence of swamps, and the swamps have 
invited the growing of a certain fruit — such 
is the chain of physical change and of human 
activity. 

Peat has formed in a large number of the 
fresh-water marshes, and at the time of the 
first geological survey of Massachusetts, about 
seventy years ago, peat was dug in most of the 
Cape towns eastward and northward from 
Brewster. That the lower Cape with its 
scrubby and scanty forest growth would wel- 
come a reserve of native fuel is not open to 
doubt, but it seems equally clear that for the 
present at least, the cost of utilizing the peat 
of the bogs is prohibitive. 

Rivers are not a very significant part of 
nature's machinery in the Old Colony. 
Around the circuit of the Bay, from Duxbury 
to Provincetown, the streams are small and 
few in number, even though they have been 
given so far as name goes, the status of rivers, 
presumably by early settlers who got their 
notion of the size of a river from the country 
of their birth. But even with them usage was 
not uniform, for the outlet of Billington Sea, 
though but a couple of miles long, is a respect- 



66 Cape Cod 

able stream, but they called this "very sweet 
water" Town Brook, and Town Brook it is to 
this day. However, there was loyalty to 
England's standards in naming Eel River, 
which drains Great South Pond and has for 
these parts the unusual length of five miles. 
Monumet River drains Great Herring Pond 
in the south of Plymouth Town into the Canal 
at Bournedale, formerly into Buzzards Bay. 

On the Cape the main streams are the outlets 
of lakes in the outwash plain. In this group 
is the stream coming from Connemesset Pond 
in Falmouth, Mashpee River from Lake Mash- 
pee, Cotuit River carrying the overflow of 
Santuit Lake, and the outlet of several ponds 
whose waters turned the ancient wheels of 
Marston Mills. A little flow of fresh water 
passes through Sandwich northward. It hard- 
ly has a length that can be measured, but it is 
perennial, its waters form a mill pond which 
no longer supplies a gristmill but is as lovely 
as any natural lake, laving the edges of sum- 
mer plantations and half surrounding the 
green promontory where sleep the fathers of 
Cape Cod's oldest town. And it has its fish 
weir, for on the Cape the herring must never 
be forgotten. The streams of the outer Cape 
are hardly more than tidal runs, such as Pamet 
River at Truro, Herring River at Wellfleet and 



The Origin of the Cape 67 

Boat Meadow Creek of Eastham and Orleans. 
As for the open Atlantic on the east side of the 
Cape, not a single fresh-water stream enters 
it, at least not one big enough to put on a map. 
Few of the lakes have surface outlets, for 
everywhere the porous subsoil allows a creep- 
ing movement of ground water that takes the 
place of the surface streams in a region of 
less porous foundations. 

Since surface streams are the main instru- 
ments by which nature sculptures her land 
surfaces, and streams play but a small part in 
the Old Colony, we may safely conclude that 
the land forms have not much changed since 
the glacial time, save where the sea has 
wrought and where the winds have served in 
a large way as carriers. This means that the 
country back from the shores is almost as it 
was, but we shall soon pass on to see how 
revolutionary have been the changes that have 
molded and re-fashioned the shorelines of 
the bays, the sounds and the open sea. 

Note. Maps of the Old Colony Region. In addition to the 
ordinary small-scale maps found in atlases, and advertising cir- 
culars, the reader who desires more than a cursory acquaintance 
may consult to great advantage, large-scale government maps. 
Primary in importance are the topographic sheets of the United 
States Geological Survey, which have a scale of one inch to the 
mile, the single sheet representing a quarter of a degree of latitude 
and a quarter of a degree of longitude. Each sheet therefore shows 
a territory extending about eighteen miles from north to south 



68 Cape Cod 

and about thirteen miles from east to west. The relief is shown 
by brown contour lines having a twenty-foot interval. The 
sheets covering the areas described in this volume are: — Duxbury, 
Plymouth, Falmouth, Barnstable, Chatham, Wellfleet and Prov- 
incetown. They may be obtained by sending ten cents each, 
by Post Office order only, to the Director of the United States 
Geological Survey, Washington, D. C. They do not take the 
place of automobile maps for they do not give the character of 
the roads. 

The shores and soundings of adjoining waters are shown in 
various maps published by the United States Coast Survey, 
(Washington). These are as follows: Cape Cod Bay, No. 1208; 
Buzzards Bay, No. 249; Hyannis Harbor, No. 247; Eastern En- 
trance to Nantucket Sound, No. 250; Provincetown Harbor, No. 
341; Wellfleet Harbor, No. 340; Barnstable Harbor, No. 339; 
Cape Sable to Cape Hatteras, No. 1000. The last shows the 
location of South Channel and St. George's Bank. 

Note. The geological reader will welcome a brief view of 
Professor Woodworth's connotation, giving his generalized sec- 
tion of Cape deposits, from younger to older. 

1. Post glacial; Beaches, blown sands, marsh deposits, lake 
silts, etc. 

2. Wisconsin Epoch; Falmouth (Cape Cod) frontal moraine 
and outwash plain. Nantucket intraglacial deposits, including 
plains of gravel, till and kames, ice-block holes on south side of 
Cape Cod. 

3. Vineyard Interval (Interglacial Epoch). 

4. Manhasset Group. 

Pebbly till at Nauset Head. 

Jacob sands, above blue clay at Highland Light. 

5. Gardiner Clay. At Highland Light (Clay Pounds.) 
Appears also on the Bay side of Truro, on the shores of Pleas- 
ant Bay in Chatham, and in Sandwich and eastward to West 
Barnstable. 

6. Jameco gravel at Highland Light under the Gardiner 
Clay. 

7. Sankaty fossiliferous moraine sands in deep well near 
Provincetown, and reported in well at Orleans. 



CHAPTER III 

THE CHANGING SHORELINE 

The Pilgrim country is all built of frail and 
destructible materials, while the sea is power- 
ful and always at work. By knowing what the 
sea is in the habit of doing and by seeing 
sample pieces of its work going on under our 
eyes, we can look at a stretch of shore and de- 
termine rather closely what it once was and 
what it will be by and by. And we have a 
time measure of three hundred years on this 
shore, during which the white man has been 
looking at the Cape, making his marks upon 
it and writing about it. 

Eastern Massachusetts, indeed eastern 
North America, was higher during most of the 
glacial invasion than it is at the present time 
and consequently the shoreline was farther 
out than now. On this broader land, north 
and eastward from the City of New York, the 
lobes of the glacier spread out and sent their 
waters in many channels across the outwash 
plains. This land with all its roughness of 

69 



70 Cape Cod 

rocky hills and tumbling glacial forms has 
gone down into the water enough to flood the 
outlying parts of the ancient coastlands. 

Into the outwash channels the salt water 
intruded and thus long, narrow bays like those 
on the south of Falmouth came into existence. 
Among the hollows of the moraines, the sea 
water found its way, and thus turned many 
hills into islands, and many ridges into penin- 
sulas flanked by straggling bays. Thus are 
to be explained the present ragged shores of 
Buzzards Bay. 

In exactly the same fashion the eastern 
shore of the Cape was irregular and broken. 
It lay out some miles farther east than the 
present line of cliffs, and has been trimmed 
back to its present position by the strong 
waves of the open ocean. The waste thus 
sliced off from the Cape has been carried to 
other situations and built into a variety of 
shore structures which had no existence at the 
close of the glacial invasion and are now 
changing so rapidly that the United States 
Coast Survey must revise its maps at intervals 
of a few years if they are to be trustworthy 
guides of the mariner. 

On the frail and exposed headlands of the 
Atlantic side of the Cape, the waves wrought 
day and night, year by year, and century after 



The Changing Shoreline 7 1 

century. Then as now, the progress was not 
always the same. Along most of the shoreline 
the summer waves do not reach the base of 
the cliffs. But even in midsummer a powerful 
storm may send the waves at high tide plung- 
ing upon the foot of the scarp, and the sands 
go crumbling into the surf. The slopes are 
steepened so that the angle of repose is de- 
stroyed and thousands of tons of the Cape's 
substance slide down on the beach to be quick- 
ly washed away. Waters and the coarser 
sands and gravels are swept along the strand. 
The waves are not alone in the work. The 
wash of every rainstorm helps and the winds 
do their part, catching up the dry sands, 
sweeping them along the cliffs, or even over 
their crests and back for some distance on the 
upland. Recession is going on and the Cape 
is becoming narrower, even though at a given 
point little change is seen from year to year. 
If the cliffs, especially those cut in loose ma- 
terial, were not undercut by the waves, they 
would become "mature," that is, they would 
assume less abrupt slopes, and would in time 
be covered by beach grass and other plants. 
These cliffs, however, for all the miles from 
Nauset Harbor to High Head, are steep, and 
as bare of greenery, as the ever-shifting sands 
of the beach below them. 



72 Cape Cod 

No question is asked more often than this — 
how fast is the cliff being cut back, and, how 
long a time will pass before the whole outer 
Cape is consumed? Mr. Isaac Morton Small 
lives in a house perched at the top of the cliff 
at Highland Light. For half a century and 
more he has watched wind and wave, made 
the official observations for the Government 
Weather Bureau, and reported the passing 
ships to the Chamber of Commerce in Boston. 
Mr. Small thinks that, during the half-cen- 
tury, the cliffs have receded eighteen inches a 
year. This has by no means, however, been 
uniform. After much undermining there was 
at one time a slip of twenty feet in width, pro- 
ducing an adjusted slope, which remained for 
a long time. At one point a cesspool overflow 
was allowed by the lighthouse authorities to 
discharge over the bank, but the resulting 
wash was so destructive that this disposal of 
waste was abandoned. The Government 
bought ten acres of land for a lighthouse site, 
from Mr. Small's ancestor, in 1797. Of this 
area about five acres now remain, and the 
time is not distant when more land must be 
acquired and the light set farther inland. 

The retreat of the outer rampart of the Cape 
is no imagining, and the old men of sixty or 
seventy years ago used to relate that they had 



The Changing Shoreline 73 

hoed corn where ships then sailed, on the dis- 
appearing edge of the town of Truro. An 
observer of the United States Coast Survey of 
a generation ago, thought the cliffs of Truro 
receded eight feet per year and those of East- 
ham five feet. This estimate is probably too 
large for any long-time average. It is believed 
there may have been one third of a mile of 
retreat in historic time, that is, during the 
three or four hundred years in which the 
white man has known something of these 
shores. This would give us four or five feet a 
year. 

No geologist has told, or can tell, how long 
a time has passed since the ice retreated from 
New England. And none can say at what 
precise date the land took its present stand in 
relation to sea level. Still one can rather safely 
affirm that the trimming of the outer Cape 
has been going on for several thousand years, 
and that it will require several thousand more 
to obliterate Truro and Eastham and Orleans. 
The land may rise, or it may go down, and 
such change would defer or hasten the end. 
What we safely get in such problems is an 
order of magnitude, in other words, the Cape 
has been losing for more than hundreds of 
years, and for less than tens of thousands — it 
falls somewhere in the thousands in the past, 



74 Cape Cod 

to shape the long curve of the eastern coast 
and it will be thousands in the future before 
the Atlantic waves might roll unhindered 
against Boston's south shore. 

That noble spirit and most keen-witted 
traveler, President Timothy Dwight of Yale 
College, writing a hundred -years ago, says 
that the permanence of Province Town had 
even then been frequently questioned. Where 
ever Dr. Dwight traveled, he had, for his 
time, as keen notions of the history of the 
land forms as he had of the manners and mor- 
als of the people, but on the sands of the Cape 
he is cautious, as well he might be, for many 
conditions enter in and quite possibly the 
younger lands of Provincetown will outlast the 
older and higher stretches of the Cape that 
lie between Provincetown and Chatham. 

The older glacial part of the Cape comes to 
an end at High Head in the northern part of 
Truro. All beyond that is a later creation 
belonging after the glacial time. Go south- 
ward thirty miles and look at the hills around 
Stage Harbor at Chatham. They too are 
glacial, but the long beaches of Monomoy 
stretching out for eight miles toward Nan- 
tucket are younger. Thus we know what be- 
comes of the trimmings, of the waste shorn 
off the east coast. It has swept northward 



The Changing Shoreline 75 

and southward and formed extensions of the 
Cape in both directions. The head of the 
Cape facing the ocean has been cut back and 
wings, or spits, built right and left, south and 
north. If we may quote the rather awkward, 
but somewhat expressive phraseology of a 
specialist on shorelines, Cape Cod is a 
"Winged behead-land." 

Between High Head and Long Point Light, 
where one rounds into Provincetown Harbor, 
are ten square miles of young country built 
by waves and winds out of the wreckage of 
the older Cape. Every visitor from Thoreau's 
day onward, has gotten some notion of the 
swift movements of Cape Cod beach sands; 
they roll with the waves, they are off with the 
winds. A stranded barge is banked speedily 
with six or eight feet of sand closing around 
its hull. Lagoons form behind beach ridges 
and outrushing waters at high tide change the 
shapes of things in the twinkling of an eye. 
A wrecked hulk that was buried in one season, 
stands out stark when next season's outing 
takes you along the shore. 

On all parts of the coast as you go northward, 
the wave movement comes in obliquely to the 
strand and the waters and their load work 
northward steadily and with some speed. A 
floating object may be thrown in on the beach 



76 Cape Cod 

but it is pretty sure to be picked up again and 
zigzagged northward and westward around the 
end of the Cape. If one remembers this it is 
not hard to understand the origin of the Prov- 
ince lands. 

High Head is bordered north, east, and west 
by cliffs cut by the waves when no fending 
beaches and sand dunes lay as to-day between 
them and the assaulting sea. Now marshes 
and lake waters lie around High Head and 
east and west of these marshes are beaches 
that border the ocean on the one side and the 
Bay on the other. 

Imagine the waves washing the foot of High 
Head cliffs. The cutting of the east shore is 
in progress for many miles southward. The 
waste moves northward and is carried beyond 
High Head and built into a long shoal in the 
direction of the place where Provincetown is 
now. This submerged bar receives constant 
additions and begins at length to appear above 
water at low tide. Then it appears at high 
tide, the sands dry and the winds lift them 
and shift them and begin the building of dunes. 
In some such way was built the first narrow 
belt of Province lands. 

But this is only the beginning of wasting 
southward and construction northward. The 
coastline has moved a little farther west and 



The Changing Shoreline 77 

the sands now migrate northward on the outer 
shore of the new belt of beach and dune, form 
new shoals, leading to new beaches and new 
dunes, and thus to the widening oceanward of 
the new strip of land. Several such lines of 
beach and dune are detectible north and east 
of Provincetown. 

The total result of this action long repeated, 
is the narrowing of the older Cape as its shore 
was crowded to the west, and the widening of 
the Province lands as their shore was developed 
toward the north and east. Put it another 
way — for some thousands of years the whole 
line of shore from Nauset to Provincetown 
has been slowly swinging on a kind of pivot 
point located near the present Highland Life 
Saving Station. 

There are other facts which add force to 
this conclusion. Within a generation salt 
waters extended up Race Run, beyond the 
point where the highroad from Provincetown 
now crosses the valley. This depression has 
been silted up and thus Race Point is built 
into solid unity with the dune lands back of 
Provincetown. And now Peaked Hill Bar is 
forming out to sea and its shoals have sent 
many a ship to its doom. It is another stage 
in the process of building out the wave and 
dune lands at the expense of the glacial lands 



78 Cape Cod 

of Truro, Wellfleet and Eastham. At some 
future time Peaked Hill Bar will emerge from 
the sea, there will be another "Race Run" 
between it and the dunes ; that will in its turn 
fill up, and another strip of land will be added 
to the newer end of the Cape. 

Into New York's lower bay, based on the 
mainland of New Jersey, Sandy Hook reaches 
northward past the backwaters of Navesink 
and Sandy Hook Bay. This little peninsula 
takes its name from a hook-shaped point that 
bends around to the west. It is made of the 
sandy waste that is driven northward and 
then swung westward in waters propelled by 
easterly winds. Coney Island and Rock- 
away Beaches show the same kind of forma- 
tion, but with them the driving movement was 
from the east. This kind of form is known to 
the physiographer as a hooked spit. 

The narrow spiral that swings around from 
the wide dune lands to inclose the harbor of 
Provincetown is of this nature. As south and 
east winds have moved the waters and their 
load northward and westward, so north, 
northwest and west winds have carried the 
work of land extension through almost every 
point of the compass, and the very tip end of 
the Cape at Long Point Light is pointing 
northeastward. 



The Changing Shoreline 79 

Now go up the shore to the beginnings of 
Nauset Beach in Eastham and Orleans. Fol- 
low the inner shore through the ins and outs 
of Town Cove, and along all the windings of 
Pleasant Bay and Chatham Harbor. This was 
the old outer shore of that part of the Cape 
and is about as the glacier left it. Outside of 
the mainlands of the Cape, Nauset beach, 
capped with dunes, runs for nearly fifteen 
miles. It is a combination of spit and barrier 
beach built out of that part of the waste of 
the Cape which is moving to the south. And 
there are more than fifteen miles of it, for the 
long beach of Monomoy, which goes miles 
south of Chatham, is a continuation of the 
same formation, corresponding in the south to 
the Provincetown spit on the north. 

The southern point of Monomoy has for 
many years grown toward the southwest, 
sometimes as much as one hundred and sev- 
enty-five feet a year, but sometimes much 
more slowly. From the end of Monomoy, 
shoals extend to Great Point, the northeast 
extremity of Nantucket. So it would look as 
if the entrance to Nantucket Sound from the 
east was narrowing, but it is not likely that 
this gap of something like eight miles will ever 
be filled and closed to ships. Great Point is 
not growing, but has sometimes worn away 



So Cape Cod 

and the narrower the passage becomes the 
more the passing currents are concentrated 
and given eroding power. So we need not 
apprehend the coming of a time when a vessel 
may not follow the route of three centuries 
around the Cape. 

Many changes have taken place in the Nau- 
set Beaches and their openings since accurate 
charts were first attempted. Pratt, in his his- 
tory of Eastham, says that Nauset, the only 
opening between Race Point, far in the north, 
and Chatham on the south, was once in East- 
ham, but has been moving south and is now in 
the town of Orleans. There is much to show 
that the openings leading to Chatham have 
changed during the white man's period. In- 
deed at the present time Monomoy is a part of 
the Cape or an island according to the pres- 
ence or absence of shifting sand. A single 
storm known as the Minot's Lighthouse gale, 
broke through Nauset Beach in 1851 and the 
channel thus made was still eleven feet deep 
sixteen years later. 

Tradition says that there were ancient pas- 
sages across the Cape, and of one there can be 
no doubt. It was through a channel in the 
town of Orleans which is known as Jeremiah's 
Gutter. It was to this that Captain Bartholo- 
mew Gosnold must have referred. He was on 



The Changing Shoreline 81 

this coast in 1602, which was the year of his 
stay on the Elizabeth Islands. He says that 
Cape Cod, that is, the northern part of what 
we call the Cape, was an island. 

Convincing proof of this is given by a map, 
prepared as a British naval chart soon after 
the year 1700. A marginal note on this map 
records the voyage of a whaleboat, sailing 
under the governor's orders, to seize the pirate 
ship Whido, which was wrecked in 1717. The 
captain in command of the whaleboat buried 
more than a hundred men who had been 
drowned in the loss of the pirate ship. Six of 
the pirates, who had been put on board of a 
seized ship as a prize crew, were captured, 
tried in Boston and executed for their crimes. 

The venerable but alert town clerk of Or- 
leans was good enough to add his informing 
presence on a visit to this historic channel. 
About a mile north of Orleans village, on the 
west side of Town Cove, where Myrick's Point 
heads into the water, the road crosses a narrow 
swale. This strip of marsh leads through the 
fields westward, is crossed by another road, 
and then by the railroad. From the railroad 
it is but a short distance to the head of Boat 
Meadow Creek, a tidal channel which leads 
through widening marshes, into Cape Cod 
Bay. 



82 Cape Cod 

The channel was from one hundred to a 
hundred and fifty feet in width and is still 
bordered in several places by low cliffs of 
erosion which date from the time when the 
tidal waters freely pulsed from sea to sea. 
Mr. Cummings, the town clerk, remembers 
the period when the marsh was a salt-water 
swamp. A canal that was dug through a sec- 
tion of the passage in 1812 he remembers as 
open and clear. The canal was made for the 
passage of salt boats, thus enabling them to 
escape the vigilance of British cruisers. As 
late as 1844, the sea is described as occasion- 
ally sweeping through at high tide. 

The canal section now shows as sharply 
distinguished from the marsh on either side by 
a heavy growth of cat-tail flags. West of the 
railroad a dike has in recent years been built 
across the Gutter. But for this dike, modern 
tides might even yet cross the Cape. 

As one pulls into Provincetown Harbor from 
Boston, imposing cliffs rise on the view to the 
east and southeast. They are on the shores 
of Truro and Wellfleet and have been made on 
the Bay side as the eastern cliffs have been 
formed on the Atlantic side of the Cape. Here 
also the wasting sands have been moved both 
northward and southward. Those shifting 
northward have been built into the beach 



The Changing Shoreline 83 

which now encloses the old East Harbor. The 
southeastern end of this inclosure is a bog 
lying under High Head, and is known as Moon 
Pond Meadow. 

There has been a southward drive of waste 
on the west of Wellfleet Harbor, and its effects 
are visible as far as Billingsgate Light. If one 
will consult the Wellfleet section of the United 
States Geological Survey's map he may ob- 
serve that Bound Brook Island, Griffin Island, 
Great Island and Great Beach Hill are not 
islands at all, though three of them are so 
named. They are tied to each other and to 
the mainland at South Truro by small barrier 
beaches except between Bound Brook and 
Griffin Islands, where the link is an area of 
tidal marsh. 

About the time of the American Revolution 
there was published in the Atlantic Neptune 
in London, a map for the use of the British 
Navy, in which all these lands were shown as 
real islands. Hence the tying beaches have 
developed within the past hundred and fifty 
years. It is said that Billingsgate Island, now 
the site of a lighthouse, was formerly joined 
to the land north of it. Another change is 
shown in the fact that a small crescent -shaped 
island about a third of a mile south of Bill- 
ingsgate as shown on the Geological Sur- 



84 Cape Cod 

vey map of thirty years ago, does not ap- 
pear at all on the Coast Survey map of the 
year 191 6. 

The waste moving to the southward does 
not stop with the islands that form the outer 
border of Wellfleet Harbor, for soundings re- 
veal extensive shoals with the waters varying 
from seven to sixteen feet, extending into Cape 
Cod Bay seven to eight miles southwest of 
Billingsgate Island. 

Other shores of the Old Colony are under- 
going constant changes, of a less conspicuous 
nature perhaps than those of the lower and 
more exposed parts of the Cape. The Coast 
Survey chart of 19 16 warns the sailor that 
Barnstable Bar is changing and that buoy 
positions are unreliable. In most respects the 
shores around Plymouth are about as they 
were in Mayflower times, but the cliffs of 
Manomet must have receded somewhat even 
though the Bay waters attack less violently 
than those of the ocean. 

The Plymouth beach has not greatly 
changed except that it is now bare of trees, an 
old map showing that it was wooded. Gurnet, 
a glacial hill, tied to the mainland by the 
growth of Duxbury Beach before the white 
man's time, looked to the Mayflower mariners 
no doubt about as it appears to-day to the 



The Changing Shoreline 85 

excursionist from Boston, save that it was 
innocent of lights or houses. 

Davis, in his Ancient Landmarks of Plym- 
outh, quotes from de Monts's expedition of 
1605, Champlain's description, Champlain 
being an officer under de Monts. He refers 
to the present Gurnet as "almost an island, 
covered with wood, principally pines," and 
then he says, "there are two islets in the harbor 
which are not seen until one has entered, and 
around which it is almost entirely dry at low 
water." Here we have, fifteen years before 
the sailing of the Mayflower, a rather detailed 
description which proves clearly enough that 
the beach which now extends from Gurnet to 
Saquish had not then come into existence, and 
Clark and Saquish were the two islands lying 
where Duxbury and Plymouth waters mingle. 

The south shore shows no such long and 
even strand lines as appear on both sides of 
the lower Cape; it is indeed intermediate in 
its character between the outer shores and the 
borders of Buzzards Bay. The waters of the 
sounds have made considerable progress in 
forming even curves, by trimming back the 
headlands and by throwing spits across the 
openings of the bays. A fine example is seen 
in the beautiful crescent of the barrier beach 
which is so attractive to bathers of Centerville 



86 Cape Cod 

and Craigsville. Here the inner and older 
shore was ragged. 

Going westward we find the new and outer 
beaches of Dead Neck and Poponesset, and the 
cliffs of Succonesset, are results of the build- 
ing and the trimming which is giving evenness 
to the shore, and changing into land-locked 
waters, Great Bay, Osterville Harbor and 
Poponesset Bay. The new and swiftly devel- 
oping shores from Waquoit and Menauhant, 
along the whole series of old bay mouths on 
the south shore of Falmouth, are illustrations 
of the same kinds of changes, which are in 
progress before our very eyes, and involve 
many temporary shiftings between the status 
of bay and lake. But we may be sure, if we 
keep our hands off and our dredges away, that 
the lake and the fresh water will win in the 
end, and that the time will come when the 
whole south shore will form an easy succession 
of gentle curves melting into one another. 

Rather less has been achieved in shoreline 
evolution on the Buzzards Bay borders. The 
Bay is narrow, and has a lesser sweep of winds, 
while the Elizabeth Islands serve as a barrier 
to prevent the free movement of ocean waves 
toward the inner shores. Hence we can ac- 
count for the roughness and immaturity of the 
shorelines about Woods Hole, about Quisset 



The Changing Shoreline 87 

Harbor and all the way north to Wenaumet 
Neck and Buzzards Bay and around to New 
Bedford. Nevertheless the observant eye will 
discern interesting and swift changes going on, 
in the closing of bays, the silting of shallows, 
the trimming of shores and the tying of islands. 
Buzzards Bay, Vineyard and Nantucket 
Sounds, Cape Cod Bay and the great ocean — 
it is an ascendant order of efficiency in which 
the smaller and the greater waters have shaped 
the lands on their borders. 

Thinking of the Cape, it is the winds that 
have seized the common fancy more than the 
waves. Though not always remembered, the 
winds create the waves, even though they 
blow a thousand miles away and great rollers 
break on the shore in days of almost perfect 
calm. The energy is there but it was applied 
to the ocean surface a long way off. 

But not always on the Cape is it a long way 
off. There are southeasters and northeasters, 
and if not these, westerlies and south wester- 
lies. And sometimes a gale is so strong that 
you lie down on the wind, lest you be tossed 
over the sea cliff or driven down the slopes of 
a glacial kettle hole. 

When one has seen the Cape as it is, he 
knows how small a part consists of deserts of 
wind-driven sand. Where the Cape is not 



88 Cape Cod 

farm and field, it is forest and scrub, or moor- 
land, with mosses, patches of resilient mesh of 
wild cranberry and clumps of bayberry, blue- 
berry and beach plum. The wind however is 
always at work, sometimes on exposed bits of 
light, glacial soil in the interior, and in no 
trivial measure on the bare faces of the sea 
cliffs. It rushed up these slopes or along them, 
removing loose material, and has on the east 
coast in many places, built sand hills at their 
crests on the great foundation of glacial de- 
posits. These are, nevertheless, the lesser 
works of the winds. 

The real fields of sand dunes are in the Prov- 
ince lands beyond High Head, and extending 
from the crescent of Provincetown northward 
to the open sea ; down the long stretches of 
Nauset and Monomoy, embracing half the 
outer length of the Cape, and for miles on 
Sandy Neck, bettfeea Cape Cod Bay and the 
great marshes of Barnstable. Minor stretches 
of sand dune run out from Town Neck in 
Sandwich, on the Falmouth beaches, and on 
various other Cape Cod shores as well as on 
the long barrier beaches of Plymouth and 
Duxbury. Of greatest extent and interest are 
the dune fields of the Province lands, for here 
the winds and the waves have been wholly 
and alone responsible for reclaiming from the 



The Changing Shoreline 89 

ocean the ten square miles of the Cape that 
lie beyond High Head in Truro. 

We have followed the currents as they 
shifted the sands of the east shore northward 
and westward to form the great hooked spit 
that incloses the harbor of Provincetown. 
First a shoal develops, then emerges a beach, 
and the sand quickly drying under sun and 
wind is picked up and thrown into heaps. 
Thus barrier beaches become dune belts and 
when such barriers are joined to the land, as 
in the filling of Race Run, the migrating sands 
retreat upon the adjoining grounds that lie 
inshore. 

At first on the tip of the Cape, there were 
no adjoining lands and we may picture a 
single curving beach ridge thrown out beyond 
the older glacial foreland, with dune hills like 
those of Nauset or Sandy Neck at the present 
time. But successive bars and developing 
beaches were built outside of the southern and 
primitive beach, and by those various growths, 
the outer cape, which is narrow at East Har- 
bor, has attained a width of three miles, where 
the State road now crosses it from Province- 
town to the life saving station. The entire 
three miles are in dune country, first through 
the gardens in the hollows back of the village, 
then winding through a forest, then a mile of 



90 Cape Cod 

sands, bare and glistening save for clumps of 
beach grass and some small pine trees planted 
by the hand of man. 

Within the dunes are a number of lakes, ly- 
ing in unfilled depressions among the sand hills 
— Shank Painter, Duck, Round, Pasture and 
Clapps Ponds. This great dune field invites 
a view from the top of the Pilgrim Monument, 
whose foundation, a hundred feet above the 
sea, is sunk in the top of a leveled sand hill. 

If one brooks at the climb, let him go aside 
from the road as he crosses to the sea,. on a 
hilltop a mile from the ocean. The perch is 
to the right of the roadway and a few feet 
higher. Toward the sea is Race Run and 
beyond it the outer range of dunes. The look- 
out is over Sahara — with an adjoining oasis of 
forest. In the strong light, the green against 
the gray, and the blue sea beyond, in the 
shifting forms, in the atmosphere of a wilder- 
ness of a unique kind, the lover of inland 
scenery may find a fresh sensation, and one 
may understand how large is the sand world 
in the lure that brings the painter and the 
would-be painter to his summer lingering in 
ancient Provincetown. 

The everlastingness of hills does very well as 
a poetic symbol of permanence, but to the stu- 
dent of the earth even rock-bedded hills and 



The Changing Shoreline 91 

granite mountains are passing away. A sand 
hill however is a thing of overnight, physio- 
graphically speaking. There is not much to 
hold the sand grains of a dune together, and 
they migrate about as freely as the falling 
leaves in October winds. 

Look at a sand hill during a high wind and 
see the attack on the exposed slope, where the 
wind picks up the grains, whirls them over the 
crest of the hill and drops them to rest on the 
lee side. Thus one slope fades and the other 
advances, and bit by bit the whole hill shifts 
its center, until in time the old ground is left 
and new ground occupied. 

There are endless changes of form also. 
Even if the dune be covered with beach grass 
or scrub, the wind may attack a single exposed 
patch, blow out the sand, deepen the hole, en- 
large its borders, removing the core of the hill 
and almost giving the blowhole and its rim 
the semblance of a volcanic cone with its 
crater. Here and there a clump of vegetation 
binds a central piece of the hill fast and the 
wind removes all the flowing fringe or base, 
giving the core or remnant abnormal steepness 
under its protective cap of gnarled roots or 
still living green. Such eccentricities of sand- 
hill evolution attract the artist colony, and fix 
themselves on many canvases. 



92 Cape Cod 

In deserts and strand lands centuries have 
seen the of ttimes painful efforts of men to fend 
off their enemy, the migrating sands. One 
may see the struggle on the Mediterranean 
borders of ancient Philistia, on the edges of 
Saharan oases, on the shores of France, Britain 
or the Low Countries, on the banks of the 
Columbia River, and, for at least two hundred 
years, in the outer parts of Cape Cod. 

On the French coast and elsewhere, stake 
and brush fences are carried along the crest of 
a dune, that the sands may lodge in and 
beyond them. When the fence is engulfed an- 
other is erected above it, until after sufficient 
upward building, the winds fail to carry the 
sand over and a barrier dune has come into 
being which protects the inland fields from 
invasion. 

This method has never been used on the 
Cape, where the more widespread method pre- 
vails of supplementing nature's protective 
efforts, by preserving natural vegetation and 
by artificial plantings of grasses and trees. 
Readers of Thoreau recall his playful imag- 
inings about tying up the Cape to its moor- 
ings, and they remember his references to the 
warning-out of the townsmen in the spring to 
plant beach grass in exposed situations. 

Fewer than the readers of Thoreau' s classic 



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The Changing Shoreline 93 

sketches are those who know that one of the 
objects of the agricultural explorers sent out 
all over the world from Washington has been 
to find sand-binding grasses, which would 
avail to hold dunes in place for the salvation 
of harbors and cultivated lands. The dangers 
of sand shifting have long been recognized on 
Cape Cod and the great fear was that the sands 
might invade the harbor of Provincetown and 
thus destroy one of the most important 
havens on the New England coast. 

The force of the winter storms is little real- 
ized by the summer inhabitants. A single 
storm may dash the sands so effectively on 
windows close to the shore that their trans- 
parency is destroyed. At the Highland Life 
Saving Station, the life guards say that they 
have covered a pane of glass with a stencil, 
and have seen letters well etched in a storm 
blowing for three hours. Sand grains as large 
as grains of wheat have been freely swept up 
from the beaches and deposited on the dunes, 
wind velocities of fifty to seventy miles an hour 
being not uncommon. 

Most of the dune lands belong to the State 
and are therefore open to public measures 
to secure their stability and to protect the 
harbor. The sovereignty of the State or the 
national government has extended through a 



94 Cape God 

period of more than two hundred years, and 
beach grass has by public authority been 
planted for much more than a century. 

The forests that exist on the end of the Cape 
and the more extensive woods that are thought 
to have stood here when the Pilgrims came, 
have provided a natural means of holding the 
sands and keeping the hills from migrating, 
but the removal of trees on this and other 
parts of the Cape, has opened new areas to the 
onslaught of the winds. The plantings car- 
ried on for several generations have in some 
measure atoned for the interrupted work of 
nature. 

The beach grass is the most important of 
the sand-binding plants. It sends up its tall 
stems and the freshly blowing sands lodge in 
the grassy thicket. Into these new sands the 
stems send out new roots while the lower and 
older roots die. Thus the growth maintains 
itself at higher levels with the upgrowth' of the 
hill, and the mesh of roots and stalks holds the 
sands from blowing away. 

Other plants useful on the dunes are the 
beach pea, the goldenrod, sand wormwood, 
bayberry shrubs, wild roses and beach plums. 
All these are either herbs or low shrubs and 
when they have developed a soil, trees may 
come in and possess the ground, especially 



The Changing Shoreline 95 

pitch pines and oaks, with a few beeches, 
birches, and maples in some places. Huckle- 
berry and blueberry bushes also help to fill in 
the spaces in these forests and the cranberry 
and other bog plants get a foothold in the 
moist places. 

The greater extension of the old forests is 
shown by forest materials which have been re- 
vealed in places where the anciently invading 
sand has been blown away, and stumps have 
been seen at low tide near Wood End Light- 
house, where no fragment of living forest ex- 
ists to-day. One investigator thinks three 
fourths of the bare sand surfaces of to-day were 
forested in historic times, and we may recall 
that Champlain's map of Plymouth and its 
harbor shows trees on the Plymouth barrier 
beach in front of the present town and harbor. 
Not only the cutting of trees for shipbuilding 
as well as for fuel, but the pasturing of stock 
was responsible for the modern exposure of 
the sands to removal. And fires have also 
played their part, both here and on many other 
parts of the Cape, finding ready fuel in the 
pitch pines and dead undergrowth. The salt 
factories which were planted in all parts of 
the Cape, made for some decades heavy de- 
mands on the fuel supply, until the processes 
of solar evaporation replaced artificial heat. 



96 Cape Cod 

The growth of Provincetown led to the de- 
struction of the trees and beach grass within 
the narrow coastal strip on which the village 
is planted. Many houses were erected on 
piles that the sand might pass under them and 
not engulf them, the use of the public road 
kept the sands exposed and the goal of all 
these loose materials was deposition in the 
harbor. 

Legislation has been enacted at intervals 
from a date as remote as 1703. It was sought 
to stop the boxing of pine trees for turpentine, 
to restrict the pasturing of cattle and to pre- 
vent the cutting of any trees within a half-mile 
of the shore. Determined efforts were made 
by the State of Massachusetts in 1825, and 
other restrictive measures were taken at inter- 
vals of a few years throughout the last century. 
Thus a "beach grass committee" for planting 
was an institution of Provincetown from 1838 
to 1893. In the last-named year the munici- 
pality was granted possession and control of 
the lands on which the town stands, all the 
rest remaining as to-day, the possession of the 
Commonwealth, bearing the name of the 
Province lands. Much beach grass has from 
time to time been planted and similar measures 
were long taken by the adjoining town of 
Truro, to protect its exposed areas. 



The Changing Shoreline 97 

About the middle of the last century the 
sea broke through the outer beach that de- 
fended East Harbor and it was felt that the 
main harbor was in danger. From that time 
the planting was actively carried on by town 
authorities, by the State and the nation. In 
1903, the general government had spent more 
than one hundred and fifty thousand dollars 
to protect Provincetown Harbor, and one item 
of this outlay was for the planting of beach 
grass. It was found about twenty -five years 
ago that the exposed sands of the outer dunes 
north of the forest area were invading the 
forest at the rate of fifteen feet per year, thus 
threatening in no distant time town and har- 
bor. Hence the plantings which the visitor 
may now see as he passes out beyond the 
forest-zone toward the ocean border. 

These plantings consist of beach grass and 
pine seedlings and in some areas these have 
been supplemented by the laying down of 
brush covers, which retain the sands of exposed 
crests until the vegetation has secured its hold. 
Similar plantations of beach grass have been 
made in other dune areas of the United States, 
as on the shores of Lake Michigan, and on 
certain Oregon and North Carolina beaches. 

All this represents a form of private and 
public activity altogether strange to most peo- 



98 Cape Cod 

pie who live at long distances from sea or lake, 
and it is one phase of the environment of the 
sea, and one example of what the sea compels 
men to do, who live by the ocean and must 
conform their lives to its activities. 

In the report of the Trustees of Public Res- 
ervations, giving, in 1893, the results of an 
investigation in 1892, a curious fact is stated — 
that while the soil in the vegetation areas of 
the Province lands is nowhere more than three 
or four inches deep, "the underlying sand is 
wonderfully retentive of moisture, so that this 
particular terminus of the Cape presents in 
its uninjured parts a more verdurous landscape 
than the main body of the outer Cape can 
show." 

Timothy D wight, after a keenly vivid and 
picturesque description of the sandy wilder- 
ness of Provincetown, explains at length the 
growth of the beach grass, the planting in 
rows with alternate spacing, or breaking of 
joints against the wind, and then as was not 
uncommon with him, improves the occasion 
by a soliloquy of admiration for the divine 
ordering which had arranged to put this plant 
in this particular place. It is not here lightly 
quoted, for be it remembered, Dwight was 
interpreting the arrangements of nature after 
the manner of Paley and not of Darwin. A 



The Changing Shoreline 99 

half-century was to pass before the Origin of 
Species would come of! the press, and the pro- 
gressive adaptation of growing things to envi- 
ronment was perforce undreamed of by the 
Yale theologian. His pre-Darwinian satisfac- 
tion must not be lost to any reader of Cape 
lore. ' ' The wisdom and goodness of the Crea- 
tor, exhibited in the formation of this plant, 
in this place, certainly claim the admiration 
and gratitude of man. But for this single, un- 
sightly vegetable, the slender barrier, which 
here has so long resisted the ravages of the 
ocean, had, not improbably, been long since 
washed away. In the ruins, Province Town 
and its most useful harbor, must have been 
lost .... No other plant grows on this 
sand. The purpose for which it seems to have 
been created, it answers easily, permanently 
and perfectly." 

One can hardly share the verdict that this 
is an "unsightly vegetable," having beheld in 
every phase of sun and shadow its marvelous, 
gray green tone, or having stood to admire on 
the sand, the circles, true as compass ever 
struck, made by leaves of beach grass, with 
drooping tips driven round and round by 
ocean winds. 

Outside of shore areas, and on the greater 
body of glacial lands which form the bulk of 



ioo Cape Cod 

the Cape, the winds have no widespread effects 
in the movement of earth materials. This is 
quite contrary to popular opinion, which to- 
day persists in looking upon all Cape Cod 
hills as sand dunes, and has slightly if at all 
outgrown the belief, expressed long ago in 
Mitchell's View of the United States that the 
Cape "consists chiefly of hills of white sand 
mostly destitute of vegetation." 



CHAPTER IV 

OLD COLONY NAMES AND TOWNS 

In a brilliant August morning by the shaded 
grave of Joseph Jefferson, a summer visitant 
met by chance, spoke of those who were 
1 'sympathetic with the Cape. ' ' If she had been 
anywhere else in Massachusetts, and had said 
"the Cape," there could have been no mistake 
and no one would have thought she intended 
Cape Ann or Cape Elizabeth. What the 
gentle lady meant by "sympathetic," is 
not easy to define, but it is not difficult to 
know. 

No name of royalty clings to this best- 
known and best-loved of New England fore- 
lands, though Captain John Smith tried to 
make it Cape James. Those who have the 
quality of sympathy are glad that here is no 
Wonder-strands of the Norse, no Cap Blanc 
of Champlain, or New Holland of Henry 
Hudson. Gosnold at first sought to fasten 
Shoal Hope upon the Cape, but had a better 
thought, and from him it gained the plain and 

1 01 



io2 Cape Cod 

worthy name which may last as long as the 
waves wash its sandy shores. 

John Smith had a keener sense when he gave 
to the great region whose shores he explored 
and mapped the name New England, for in 
surface, climate and shoreline, as well as in 
the industries and principles of its people, the 
new country compares in manifold ways with 
the old. With all suitableness therefore, the 
map of New England is sprinkled everywhere 
with English names. They are spread in a 
sort of historical layer over the older deposit 
of Indian designations. 

This overlapping stratification of names is 
carried far in New York. Witness the Dutch 
wave of migration in the Hudson and lower 
Mohawk valleys, the Palatine German on the 
upper Mohawk, and the English names coming 
by way of New England to central, western 
and northern New York. The Empire State 
goes far also in the appropriation of the names 
of early federal and local statesmen. 

The Old Colony, in contrast, got its outfit 
of names before there were any federal states- 
men and the early comers did not so freely as 
in New York burden the towns and villages 
with family or first-settler names, with the 
suffix ville. Nor did the Old Colony catch a 
shower of Romes, Scipios, Uticas, Ithacas and 



Old Colony Names and Towns 103 

other classic cognomens. Mainly therefore, on 
the Cape and around Plymouth, we find In- 
dian and English names with here and there 
a memorial of some name of honor in the 
church or in civil life. 

In the roll of towns, English adoptions are 
far in the majority. Off the Cape we have 
Duxbury, Kingston, Plymouth, Halifax, 
Wareham and Middleboro. One would not 
like to think of Plymouth as Saint John Har- 
bor, Port of Cape St. Louis, or Crane Bay. 

On the Cape are the English place names, 
Sandwich, Falmouth, Barnstable, Yarmouth, 
Harwich, Eastham and Truro. Barnstable 
gets its name from Barnstable, a market town 
of Devonshire. The latter is on a small navi- 
gable river a few miles from the sea and is 
thought to be the port from which some early 
settlers in the Cape town sailed. Regarding 
Yarmouth, Swift, its historian, thinks the 
town may have been named from old Yar- 
mouth of England, not because any group of 
colonists came from it, but because it was 
known to the settlers as the chief English port 
for Holland. 

The elder Truro is a very ancient city, not 
far from Falmouth in Cornwall. The Cape 
Truro was first Pamet, then Dangerfield, and 
became Truro in 1709. The historian of the 



104 Cape Cod 

town, though his studies produced a large vol- 
ume, does not appear to have found the con- 
nection, if any, between the old town and the 
Cape Truro. 

Chatham bears its name in honor of William 
Pitt, the Earl of Chatham. The newcomer on 
the Cape learns after a time not to scant the 
second syllable, but to pronounce with the 
accent about equally distributed and the vowel 
brought out in both parts — Chat-ham — the 
same usage applying to Eastham. Some old 
Cape people seem to hit the second syllable a 
little harder than the first, but on the other 
hand, the trainmen, who may not be natives, 
are likely to call — Chatum. 

In aboriginal days, the region of Falmouth 
was Succanesset, Yarmouth was Nobscusset, 
Chatham was Monamoyick and Eastham was 
Nauset. Mashpee is the only Indian name 
which has been retained by a town on the 
Cape. Three towns do honor, in their names, 
to early settlers. One of these is the first town 
to be crossed as we go upon the Cape, the 
youngest member of the family in Barnstable 
County, the town of Bourne. An ancient and 
honorable family went to the Old Testament 
and called various of its offspring, Jonathan, 
Bathsheba and Shearjashub, but the town 
name was given in special honor of the saintly 



Old Colony Names and Towns 105 

friend of the Indians, Richard Bourne. Den- 
nis recalls the Reverend Josiah Dennis, for 
thirty-seven years minister; and Brewster car- 
ries down the name of Elder William Brewster 
of Scrooby, Ley den and Plymouth. 

Provincetown is the Town of the Province 
lands. The name of Wellfleet is traced, per- 
haps conjecturally, to Whale fleet, and Orleans 
is the only town in the county which has what 
may be called an alien designation. It was 
the good fame of the democratic Duke of 
Orleans, which, in 1797, when the town was 
set off from Eastham, led to the choice of the 
name. A part of Wellfleet is said to have 
acquired the name Billingsgate, because of the 
planting of oysters in the neighborhood. It 
was not altogether fanciful to adopt the name 
of the great fish market of London. It still 
appears on the map attached to the island and 
the light at the outer opening of the harbor. 

Most of the towns have in addition to their 
principal village, their satellite Easts and 
Wests, Norths and Souths, but they are not 
located so far as one can see, with much re- 
gard to the points of the compass, at least in 
several of the towns. Other village names 
show a good deal of variety in their origin. 
Indian names abound in Bourne and Fal- 
mouth, as Pocasset, Cataumet and Waquoit. 



106 Cape Cod 

The Indian chief, whose name is variously 
spelled, and may be something like Iyanough, 
comes out in two village names of the town of 
Barnstable as Wianno and Hyannis. 

Marston's Mills adds one to the list of old 
settlers' names and some villages have descrip- 
tive designations, as in Forest Dale in Sand- 
wich and Osterville — Oyster ville — in Barn- 
stable. According to Freeman, Grand Island 
was once Oyster Island and the settlement was 
Oyster Island village. A flag-bordered lakelet 
in North Truro gave to this snug village the 
early name of Pondsville. A hole, being a 
short word for a narrow passage swept by 
runs of the tide, gives us appropriately a name 
for one of the Cape's frequented harbor vil- 
lages, Woods Hole. 

Unless we except shore forms no natural 
features put such a profuse assortment of 
names on the map as the lakes and ponds. 
Many names are derived from their size and 
shape. In Great South Pond in Plymouth we 
find recorded both size and position. There 
is also Great Pond in Barnstable, known now 
to the tourist, more takingly perhaps, as We- 
quaket. Eastham and Wellneet each has its 
Great Pond. The name Long Pond solved the 
naming problem in all parts of the Old Colony. 
Plymouth has its example, likewise Falmouth, 




A PROVINCETOWN ALLEY 



Old Colony Names and Towns 107 

drawing its water supply from the lake that 
stretches its waters and its bordering slopes 
far back into the great Falmouth moraine. 
The Long Pond which is the largest fresh 
water on the Cape lies between Brewster and 
Harwich. Wellfleet has two Long Ponds, 
though neither deserves the name, and Barn- 
stable, Bourne and Yarmouth have each one. 

A triple group of beautiful kettle-hole waters 
gives us Triangle, from its shape, Lawrence, 
from an old family, and Spectacle Pond, a 
descriptive name. Falmouth also has a Spec- 
tacle Pond. One of the Wellfleet Long Ponds 
is grouped with five others showing a sufficient 
assortment of naming motives — Gull, Higgins, 
Herring, Newcomb, and Round Ponds. 

Herring ponds, drained each by a Herring 
River, we find in Wellfleet and Eastham. 
Harwich has its Herring River, and Monumet 
River in Bourne drains Great and Little Her- 
ring Ponds in Plymouth. Eel River in the 
latter town recalls one safeguard of the May- 
flower people, who could, if need be, save 
themselves from starvation by the suggested 
kind of fishing. 

Remembering the hundreds of lakes little 
and large within the Old Colony there is no 
need for wonder that the vocabulary of the 
pioneers was sometimes taxed, that names 



108 Cape Cod 

were duplicated and that some are highly fan- 
ciful. The marsh at the border, the water, 
transparent or turbid, the bird that flew over, 
the lily pad on the surface, the oyster in the 
landlocked bay — all offered themselves to the 
settler or the surveyor and he placed them in 
his memory or on his map. If resources failed, 
he could call a water great, or long, or round 
when it was none of these, or fall back upon 
Lawrence, or Jenkins, Hinckley, Wakeby, 
Lewis or Shiverick. The Cape has at least 
four Flax Ponds, three of them inside a five- 
mile radius. 

Remembering Oneida, Seneca, Cayuga, and 
Canandaigua of the New York lakes, or listen- 
ing to gently flowing waters in Genesee, Sus- 
quehanna, Chenango, and Unadilla, the waters 
of the Old Colony are poor in Indian names 
though we do find Cotuit, Santuit, Mashpee, 
Ashumet and Coonemossett. If we go to the 
shore features, the Indian heritage is larger — 
Saquish, Manomet, Scusset, Nobscusset, 
Namskaket, Pamet, Monomoy, Quamquisset, 
Cataumet and Wenaumet. 

Shoot Flying Hill is now no doubt more 
sought for views of Bay and Sound, than for 
the destruction of migrant wild fowl. Clay 
Pounds, used sometimes of the recessed cliffs 
by Highland Light, has been interpreted as 



Old Colony Names and Towns 109 

derived from the pounding of wrecks upon the 
hard sea banks, but this sounds rather mythi- 
cal and sends the curious on further inquiry. 
Not many hills have received a name; but a 
few have become landmarks — Manomet and 
Telegraph Hill in Plymouth, Bourne's Hill in 
Sandwich, German's Hill in Yarmouth and 
Scargo Hill in Dennis. 

Old Colony life planted itself on the sea- 
border and there it has remained. South of 
Marshfield are Duxbury, Kingston, and Plym- 
outh, all reached by the tides. From Plym- 
outh along the shore to Sagamore, the country 
is a wilderness, holding a few ancient cottages 
and invaded here and there by summer folk. 
All the back part of Plymouth Town, save 
for scattered hamlets and cranberry bogs, is 
forest country. 

The upper Cape has a fringe of settlements 
on all its shores. We go by easy reaches from 
Sagamore to Sandwich and West Barnstable 
and then there is an almost continuous village 
from Barnstable through Yarmouth Port, Yar- 
mouth and Dennis to Brewster. The Buzzards 
Bay shore has an unbroken panorama of vil- 
lages and cottage grounds, from Buzzards Bay 
to Woods Hole, and a score of villages line the 
south shore, for forty miles from Woods Hole 
to Chatham. More commonly the latter are 



4 



no Cape Cod 

not directly on outer shores, but at the inner 
end of tidal bays as at East Falmouth, Wa- 
quoit, Marston's Mills, and Hyannis. There 
is scarcely a break in the long grouping of sum- 
mer homes and village streets, from Osterville 
to Chatham. 

Between the Bay chain of settlements and 
these on the Sound, is a wilderness which in- 
cludes the summits and south slopes of the 
great moraine and the wide inner belt of the 
outwash plain. One drives from Falmouth to 
Sandwich through more than a dozen miles of 
almost unbroken forest. Here are the oaks 
and pines framing in the lakes, a country that 
is now invaded more and more by the Portu- 
guese gardener, the farms of a few opulent 
agriculturists and the homes and camps of 
those who feel no compelling bent toward salt 
water. 

On the lower Cape the villages are either in 
the interior or on the shores of Cape Cod Bay. 
There is escape from the severity of oceanic 
storms but in no case is there a separation from 
tidal waters. Orleans is on Town Cove, but 
is nearer to the Bay than to the ocean. Well- 
fleet at the head of its spacious harbor waters, 
is midway between the Bay and the Atlantic. 
The Truros open to the west shore and Prov- 
incetown is on the protected inner strand. 



Old Colony Names and Towns in 

Chatham is the only village on the ocean side 
of the Cape. From Chatham to Province- 
town, a distance of more than forty miles 
following the beach, the shore wilderness is 
broken only by lights, life-guard stations and 
a few summer cottages. One could follow 
Thoreau's track from Nauset northward, and 
only at intervals of several miles find inter- 
rupted the solitudes which he describes. 

Every village, after the manner of Plym- 
outh, will yield reasons why a particular site 
was early chosen as a center of homes. Set- 
tlers want a decently good soil, they want 
water, and trees and protection from storms. 
And in a maritime neighborhood, they want 
the easiest access to the sea. Thus Sandwich 
grew by a small stream, whose water invited 
the herring and turned the first millwheel on 
Cape Cod. This stream flows down through a 
snug recess in the northern border of the mo- 
raine. The homes are among the hills and 
the business part reached down to the old 
harbor in the marshes. The comely old homes, 
once deeply secluded now bordered by the 
busy highway from Boston, stand pocketed 
between the main masses of the moraine on 
the south, and ridges of recessional moraine 
that rise steeply at the north. 

The villages of Barnstable, Yarmouth Port 



ii2 Cape Cod 

and Yarmouth are on the borders of Barn- 
stable Bay, and their sites were no doubt 
chosen for harbor protection, favorable condi- 
tions for fishing and clamming, soils better 
than the average on the Cape, and for those 
seemingly endless stretches of the Great 
Marshes, which in old times supplied large 
gatherings of salt hay. The Brewsters and the 
northern Dennises stand within easy distances 
of the north shore on the route which must 
always have been traced in going down the 
Cape from Plymouth or Boston. 

The compelling condition of concentration 
at Woods Hole is its harborage. Always open 
to whalers and fishermen, it is the natural 
calling point between New Bedford and the 
outer islands, and in these days of the railway 
and the motor car, it transfers a multitude 
between land and sea during the summer pe- 
riod, and has charms of its own, waters, pass- 
ing ships, the views of the Vineyard shore, and 
backgrounds of glorious hill and forest. 

Across these hills and on the other side of 
the forest is Falmouth. The early settlers 
landing between Oyster and Fresh Ponds, 
went about a mile back from the shore and 
built their permanent homes on the fertile 
plain at the eastern base of the moraine. At 
the railway station one is at the foot of the 



Old Colony Names and Towns 113 

morainic hills and on the western edge of the 
plain. From the main street one may go 
through a churchyard and find himself at the 
edge of Fresh Pond, looking toward the sea. 
On the other side, in the rear of the post office, 
is another charming fresh water, lying also 
behind the Town Hall and on the edge of the 
lawns where the Public Library stands. It 
took no special wisdom to locate Falmouth — 
the men of 1660 followed the index finger of 
nature. 

Cotuit, Hyannis, Chatham, and indeed all 
the sOuth-shore villages are on the borders of 
protected waters, inviting fishing and trade in 
the old days and open to summer homes and 
summer sailing in these times. In the shallow 
bays, oystering, clamming, and scalloping, if 
they do not make many rich, at least save the 
traditions of old time, and avert from the sum- 
mer world the unthinkable loss of chowders, 
steamed clams, and broiled lobster. 

If one enters Nauset Harbor and makes a 
right-angle turn into Town Cove, he will ar- 
rive, after sailing about five miles, at the head 
of the Cove and find straggling about this end 
shore the village of Orleans. The town bor- 
ders both bay and ocean, but the village is 
more secluded from the ocean than any of its 
sister communities on the Cape. Like Fal- 



H4 Cape Cod 

mouth, it is one of those sites which need no 
explanation, but for the simple fact that the 
greater part, in the realm of geography at 
least, see but do not perceive. 

The straggling little Truro is about equal- 
ly distant from the inner and outer shores, 
in the well-shielded Pamet valley, setting its 
churches, however, in utterly exposed places 
on the high hills. One can hardly think these 
windy hilltops were chosen to compel walking 
exercise on Sunday morning, for dearth of ex- 
ercise in the older days of the Cape is unim- 
aginable. The churches were beacons, per- 
haps as an afterthought, and possibly were 
perched high to be as near heaven as was 
possible. 

North Truro, however, planted its churches 
like its homes, in a valley. Here valleys join 
and the snug little place is in a kind of bowl, 
not far from the Bay shore, bordering the 
small pond, from which, as we suppose, it was 
once known as Pond Village. 

Going down the Cape one passes the great 
shops and new-looking houses of Sagamore, 
and if he is making his first exploration he is 
wondering what can lie behind so prosaic a 
doorway, if he has come all this way for forges, 
chimneys, sidings jammed with newly com- 
pleted freight cars, and dreary wastes spread 



Old Colony Names and Towns 115 

with dredgings from the Canal and still star- 
ing verdureless at the traveler. In a few min- 
utes he finds himself in ancient Sandwich, and 
what he thinks of that old town will hinge 
upon the mode of his going. Two visions were 
never so opposite as those that greet the eye 
through the Pullman window, and in the 
motor car. 

At the railroad end of Sandwich, round brick 
smokestacks of huge size rise over the ancient 
glass factory. The walls are falling out in 
places, and one part of the decaying structure 
does duty as a storage place for fish. Beyond 
the ruins are yards full of rubbish, and tall 
with weeds, stretching down to a channel, an 
empty trench between walls of mud at low 
tide, leading its sinuous way across wide salt 
marshes, and past a ridge of dunes to the 
waters of the Bay. In the environs are small 
dwellings, some of them rejuvenated after long 
dilapidation and occupied by populous fami- 
lies of Italians, whose men folk go every day 
to work in the shops of Sagamore. 

The real New England town, of mansions 
and white paint, of churches and homes, of the 
town hall and the public monuments, gathers 
at the foot of the mill pond and along the state 
road both east and west. Here under shade 
so densely arched as to be almost twilight, 



n6 Cape Cod 

live the descendants of the ancient settlers, in 
an atmosphere of repose which seems hardly 
disturbed by the cars that ceaselessly pass in 
the summer months. In the winter, silence 
is pretty well maintained in Sandwich, save 
when an occasional Old Colony train rumbles 
by or a steam whistle shrieks on the Bay or 
along the Canal. 

How general it is in New England, we do not 
know, but on the Cape, if a query takes one 
to the town hall, there will almost certainly 
be found one, two, or three of the elder citi- 
zens, men of the ancient lineage, of sound in- 
telligence and community loyalty, carrying on 
the town business. And information is not 
the only good that the visitor brings away from 
such interviews. Sandwich makes no break 
in this rule, maintaining a dignity which, in 
spite of its dearth of business, is worthy of the 
oldest town in the county. 

Here and there is found a mill pond or reser- 
voir to which nature and a discreet art have 
given all the possible beauty of a natural lake. 
Such is the mill pond in Sandwich. In truth 
the water had a little natural pond as the nu- 
cleus of it, but this does not lessen the marvel. 
At the lower end stood the little old mill of 
former years. On the outlet is a fish way for 
the omnipresent herring. Around the lower 



Old Colony Names and Towns 117 

parts and on both sides for a distance are 
modest streets and old homes and the upper 
parts wind back among the hills. 

The more ancient of the two cemeteries is 
on a green promontory which sets out into the 
pond. Here the old stones bear such names as 
Freeman, Faunce, Bourne, Bodfish and Nye. 
Sunlight, trees, children frolicking in the wa- 
ter, a canoe or two, greenery and reflections 
on the other side, and old marbles and slates — 
if there be such a thing as perfect resting 
places for the dead, the Cape has some of them 
and this is one. 

Southward from Sandwich the road leads up 
into the moraine and past Bourne Hill to For- 
est Dale, Wakeby and Farmersville. So small 
are these hamlets that one rather needs infor- 
mation that he has arrived, but he is in the 
lake country of Peter's Pond, of Mashpee, 
Spectacle, Lawrence and Triangle; and to 
reach it he has come through miles of forest 
country unbroken by a single shack or a soli- 
tary garden plot. 

Across the railroad and not far from the 
village is Town Neck, a big and rambling hill 
given to common pasture in the old days. It 
is innocent of trees save a few small specimens 
on the slope facing the town, and where the 
descendants of ancient cattle have not cropped 



1 18 Cape Cod 

the grass, are growths of bayberry, low black- 
berry, and wild rose. If, as some say, Sand- 
wich looks like an old English village, this is 
the place to see it so. There is the slender 
steeple of the Congregational church, rising 
against the forest slopes of the northern face 
of the moraine, with Bourne Hill at the left, 
showing its flat-arched curve on the horizon. 

The desolation of the old glass factory and 
its big brick stacks loses its ugliness at this 
distance and recalls the activity and fame of 
former generations. On the east are the 
marshes of Dock Creek and Old Harbor Creek, 
fronted along the shore by a chain of dunes. 
Beyond the marshes is Spring Hill and yet 
farther east, beginning four miles away, is the 
long-extended group of hills known as Scorton 
Neck. All these heights, Town Neck, Spring 
Hill and Scorton Neck, are moraines of reces- 
sion, leaving valleys southward in which we 
find the highway and the railway. 

Northwest from Town Neck is the northern 
opening of the canal, with a long breakwater 
reaching into the Bay on the northwest side 
of the channel. Then comes Scusset Beach 
and the great cliffs that stretch off toward 
Plymouth, with Manomet in the distance. 
The morainic ridge from Manomet south past 
Bournedale rises commandingly onthehorizon. 



Old Colony Names and Towns 119 

Not all the lore of Sandwich is in the town 
hall. Along the highway came the grandson 
of "Johnny Trout," Daniel Webster's guide 
and friend when he dropped his burdens and 
turned to the black bass of Mashpee and the 
trout of the Cape streams. Not far away the 
grandson was born, for Webster and his 
friends had given the old fisherman a plot of 
ground on which he built a home. The ceme- 
tery was near — the newer one in the west, and 
to it the old man that he is now, led the way. 
There he was long the caretaker, and there he 
brought a deed by which he handed to Joseph 
Jefferson the title to a lot which had been his 
own, but unused. The actor's answer was, 
"They wouldn't let me live in Sandwich but 
they can't prevent my burial here." Then 
Jefferson sat down on the grass with Grover 
Cleveland for two hours of old friends' talk. 

On other authority than the old man's, it is 
certain that the actor and the statesman both 
wished to own homes in Sandwich. Over- 
thrifty owners of property, for thrift in the 
narrow sense is not a stranger to all Cape peo- 
ple, put their prices so far up, that neither son 
of fame would buy, and thus Sandwich missed 
her largest opportunity. As for Benjamin 
Denison, the grandson of "Johnny Trout," 
reminiscent of old sailing days in Singapore, 



i2o Cape Cod 

Batavia, and Melbourne, caretaker and friend 
of the great, may he yet, a " Cape Cod type," 
as nearly as any, beguile many a stroller by 
the wayside in Sandwich. 

This ancient town has its summer people, 
but they seem to be her own sons, the mansions 
are all staid and old — no great hotels and pri- 
vate palaces of the newer architecture — no 
estates covering wide acres or even square 
miles of the Cape's territory — no trespass 
signs — nothing to raise a fear that old Barn- 
stable County is losing its democratic equality 
of feeling and its simple neighborly ways. 

Barnstable is neighbor on the east — East 
Sandwich, West Barnstable, Barnstable — 
these are the calls on the train. By the plain- 
est of country railway stations, almost on the 
railway track, to a modest ancestral home, 
comes a distinguished Harvard Professor in 
the summer, to rest himself with Indian lore, 
eat his summer apples, look out on Great 
Marshes and Sandy Neck, and show forth the 
eternal loyalty of the Cape's sons. 

You go down a little hill, three minutes, and 
you are on Barnstable's main — we might al- 
most say only — street. You look up and 
down, you are looking for the business part of 
the village and while you are looking you have 
gone through it unaware. Where you inter- 



Old Colony Names and Towns 121 

sect this one street you find all the essentials 
of a county seat. Here is an old courthouse 
of solid stone, with low and narrow halls, ap- 
propriate conductors to the not much popu- 
lated jail that is behind the seat of justice. A 
few steps westward is the town hall, of wood, 
one-storied and new. Between the town and 
the county building is an old style single- 
storied country lawyer's office, and across the 
way is an inn. It is all there within a stone's 
throw. 

Go in one direction and if you go far enough 
you will rind the Post Office and the old custom 
house. It is all one building and on a hill, but 
the custom house is to be given over appro- 
priately to be a home for local history. Across 
the road is the old first church and around 
are the gravestones of the fathers. Some of 
the more weathered slabs — being mounted in 
a horizontal position, they have weathered 
rapidly — have been recently topped with new- 
ly inscribed stones, put there by loyal de- 
scendants to keep legible the record of their 
fathers. 

Go in the other direction, westward, and if 
you go far enough, you will find the town 
pump, the Episcopal Church and the school- 
house. Both ways, east and west, walking 
until you are weary, there are lovely homes. 



122 Cape Cod 

At one extremity, if you can find such a thing 
in Barnstable village, is the Barnstable County 
Fairground, where late in August, are assem- 
bled the farm products, domestic handiwork, 
and, most important of all, the people of the 
Cape. A bit of vaudeville, a race or two, and 
if he can come, the Governor of Massachu- 
setts, make the event complete, and the Cape, 
from Bourne to Provincetown, goes home 
satisfied. 

At the outer end, or where the end ought to 
be, is a well-kept forest nursery of the State of 
Massachusetts. Beyond the end, where one 
looks off toward West Barnstable, there is a 
change — smaller houses, more farming, differ- 
ent people — it is Finn-land, the Cape's prin- 
cipal colony of these migrants from the lake 
country of northern Europe. 

In front of Barnstable is the harbor, heading 
for miles of tidal channels among the intermi- 
nable acres of the Great Marshes. In these 
are many groups of piles once driven to sup- 
port and keep from the soggy ground thou- 
sands of tons of salt hay. Unoccupied with 
stacks to-day, save here and there, these use- 
less foundations give a look of abandonment 
and desolation. Beyond the marshes and the 
harbor, is Sandy Neck, miles of it, built as a 
rampart beach along the open Bay, and sur- 



Old Colony Names and Towns 123 

mounted by dunes, here bare, there covered 
with forest. 

A freezing plant and a small dock shed 
where local fishermen bring their catches, 
these and a few cottages, are the only signs of 
life about this harbor, save on the east where 
stands Yarmouth Port. There a dredge is 
opening a channel towards another and greater 
freezing plant, and saves these waters from 
utter quietude. 

A new cranberry bog was coming into being 
on the edge of the harbor and close to the 
center of the village. A part of it had been 
planted and had seen a year's growth, the 
plants still small and standing in rows about 
fifteen inches apart. An old Finn was at work 
alone, removing sand from the adjoining parts, 
to secure a grade. Interminable looked the 
job with a single wheelbarrow. He had been 
in this country thirty years, but spoke English 
villainously. He almost resented the surmise 
that an engineer must have helped him to his 
grades. And the owner afterward told the 
writer that he had the same experience with 
the old man, who, by sighting on the ground 
had laid out last year's section of the bog with 
but infinitesimal error. Good English or bad, 
he knew the change in the conditions of living. 
Ten cents per hour formed his wage when he 



124 Cape Cod 

came to America and "dot vass a leetle more 
better what feefty seexty cent iss now," said 
this adopted son of old Barnstable. 

People in Barnstable? Yes, and friendly as 
in all Old Colony towns. They will stop their 
business to talk politics, local history, or the- 
ology — leave their store unattended to show 
you their wide-spreading apple trees, their 
seven-foot popcorn and their nine-foot field 
corn, will graciously answer your questions 
and direct you to the next place of your desire. 
And if you visit the courthouse you are sure 
to meet a genial greeting from the County 
Clerk of long service, and you may have cheer- 
ful conversation with the judge of the court, 
and greet a captain or two from Hyannis, 
Chatham, Falmouth or Wellfleet. 

Here in Barnstable in 1839, the two hun- 
dredth anniversary of the founding was held, 
with elaborate ceremony. Whatever has hap- 
pened to other towns, Barnstable has more 
than a chance, twenty years hence, of coming 
to her tercentenary with traditions unimpaired 
and her straggling main street keeping un- 
spoiled the look of past generations. 

The Town of Barnstable, which reaches 
across the Cape and straggles along both Bay 
and Sound, is said to have fourteen post offices. 
Larger than the parent village is Hyannis, on 



Old Colony Names and Towns 125 

the south shore, the permanent population 
being not far below two thousand. Like every 
other New England village, it has a broad 
main street, bordered with old homes • and 
heavily shaded, but there is no public square. 
There is a lesser avenue running parallel and 
there are a few cross-streets. On the south 
edge of the village is an arm of the great Lewis 
Bay, where are summer cottages and good 
sailing for pleasure boats, and the only serious 
occupations, and these not too serious, are 
clamming and scalloping. 

The rather aristocratic annex to Hyannis is 
Hyannis Port, a place of beauty on the hilly 
shore a couple of miles to the southwest where 
costly mansions, golf and boating occupy a 
comely bit of the south shore. The railway, 
branching from the main line at Yarmouth, 
has its chief station on the main street and a 
port terminal at the shore. Apparently, how- 
ever, this marine extension is useless, for 
Hyannis no more does a marine trade. 

Whether a town is spoiled or not by summer 
trade depends on the point of view. The 
pockets of the merchant and boarding-house 
keeper give one answer, the aesthetic feelings or 
the chafed nerves of the visitant may give 
another. Be it as it may, the last Fourth of 
July gave a census of nine thousand automo- 



126 Cape Cod 

biles passing a given point on the principal 
thoroughfare of Hyannis. 

Someone in our hearing spoke of "Robber 
Street." Well what is that? The west end 
was the reply. We do not say the implication 
is fair, but something has happened in the old 
Cape village. There one can find Miss X's 
or Miss Y's or Miss Z's gift shop, for sweaters, 
yarns, baskets, windmills and wind vanes. 
There too are bungalows offering suits, cre- 
tonnes, rugs, embroidery, china, glass, an- 
tiques, statuary, chairs, and chests on the lawn 
in front, mahogany and brass, quite direct no 
doubt from Boston or New York — sideboards, 
highboys, bureaus, old mirror frames without 
mirrors, and salesladies who do not in the 
least resemble Cape Cod. 

Motor cars are standing in front, some of 
them occupied by men having resignation on 
their faces. In front of a small bungalow 
home, another gift shop, is for sale a pair of 
andirons five feet in height, which surely did 
not come out of any Barnstable or Yarmouth 
ancient sitting-room. 

There are low cottages and high houses and 
in some back gardens are higher observation 
towers to bring Lewis Bay or Nantucket Sound 
up to the main thoroughfare. The sign of the 
town clerk and treasurer is posted on the front 



Old Colony Names and Towns 127 

of a comfortable dwelling house. Farther 
along is an old-style lawyer's office and sign 
in a back yard. A coal and wood, hay and 
grain office is in a dainty bungalow in the 
rear of a home. Then one finds a real Cape 
house, story and a half, old square chimney, 
shingled from cornice to ground — it refuses 
to budge in its modern and mingled envi- 
ronment. 

If one wants to know what a summer on 
Cape Cod gives — it offers like all other places 
of resort to a degree what the visitor carries 
to it, the choice is an open one, and where 
there is one shop or one band concert, or one 
palace hotel, there are leagues of surf, miles of 
cliff and sand dune, an endless wilderness of 
forest, lake, and moor, the unsullied purity of 
the air, and the limitless sea. 

One might be set down in the village of 
Falmouth and not know for a little time that 
he was near the sea. Indeed Fresh Pond comes 
in almost to the principal street, but one would 
not know at its inner end that it was an old 
salt bay, having now a narrow artificial outlet 
to let in the herring in their annual migration. 
There is no great landlocked bay as at Cotuit 
or Hyannis, and no waste of salt meadow as 
in Sandwich or Barnstable. A mile of solid 
green turf however leads down to the sandy 



128 Cape Cod 

beach on Vineyard Sound and the cliffs and 
crest lines of Martha's Vineyard seem close at 
hand across the seven miles of water that 
intervene. 

Many disciples of "the old man," looking 
over that water, would have a kindly and rev- 
erent thought, recalling that often in the 
years, that master teacher of earth lore, Na- 
thaniel Southgate Shaler, looked out over the 
same waters and saw the same skyline as he 
went to his summer rest on the island. 

One does not readily think of Falmouth as 
now or ever a place for sailors. The only har- 
bor is a dredged embayment, known before 
the Government deepened it, a dozen years 
ago, as Bowman's Pond. And a few small 
yachts comprise the usual outfit of that 
comfortable haven. 

Falmouth is old, but it is very new — it has 
the village green and the elms and the colonial 
houses that place it in the old New England 
class, but it has environed itself with the city 
and like the city it is. There is no failing to 
know it when you are in the business center, 
the shops crowd together and are spacious and 
modern, albeit of one story, and, let it be 
added, the only bank in Falmouth village is 
in a one-story bungalow addition to an old 
dwelling. Here, in the middle hour of a sum- 



Old Colony Names and Towns 129 

mer morning, solid lines of motor cars await 
the opening of the post-office windows. 

Falmouth, however, did not escape the 
ocean but is like every other Cape town in its 
history. She sent out her whalers and her 
fishermen from Woods Hole or New Bedford, 
but she drew the profits of voyaging, disci- 
plined her young men to the waves and re- 
ceived her ship captains home to honorable 
retirement as did Barnstable, Yarmouth or 
Chatham. To-day one need not look far to 
meet the gracious, elderly sons and daughters 
of those old shipmasters and shipowners, and 
they will receive you heartily and tell you to 
your heart's content the inherited lore of the 
ocean. 

People go on the Cape searching for types, 
and here they may find them — but not of the 
supposed grammar-smashing, close-fisted, and 
profane old Cape Codder, dwelling in a low, 
shingled cottage, in rooms that are never 
opened to the ocean and air and are innocent 
of all furniture that is less than a hundred 
years old. In sober truth there will appear 
courteous men and women, speaking English 
good enough for all daily use, living in two- 
story houses, mansions often, with modern 
comfort, prudent and decently thrifty, witty 
in quiet, unexpected turns of thought and 



130 Cape Cod 

phrase, people not to be patronized, but to be 
respected and beloved for their worth and 
their neighborly ways. 

If the newcomer in Chatham has a geograph- 
ic bent, likes to keep the points of the compass, 
and have a mental picture of the plan of the 
streets and shores, he will have more trouble 
than in any other village of the Cape. The 
layout of Chatham is as rambling as in Barn- 
stable or Orleans and less simple. The railway 
station, the new post office, the big hotel, the 
old windmill, the wireless plant, and the light- 
house might have been sown broadcast from 
a giant airplane, so promiscuously are they 
placed, along the ocean lagoons and around 
landlocked tidal bays. 

These bays, which are Oyster Pond and Mill 
Pond, are in kettle holes resulting from stag- 
nant blocks of ice, that were such frequent 
features of the outwash plain when it was in 
the making, indeed, Chatham seems in aimless 
fashion to straggle around Mill Pond. 

Looking on the map one might expect to 
look out from Chatham down the long beach 
of Monomoy, but beyond Stage Harbor are 
grounds of some height, covered by woods and 
shutting off the view. There are bluffs at the 
Hawthorne Inn, and at Twin Lights also, 
marking an earlier stage of wave erosion in- 



Old Colony Names and Towns 131 

shore. Now the barrier has been built outside 
and the inclosed lagoons are rapidly silting up. 
The surf on Chatham Bars marks the shoal 
part of the barrier. In some future time here 
too the land will conquer the sea, and Chat- 
hamites will have to go out across the lagoon 
and over the sands of the barrier beach to gain 
a view of the surf. 

An inscription at Twin Lights says that the 
lights were four hundred feet out from the 
present cliffs forty years ago. Like changes 
could be seen at Si asc onset on the Nantucket 
shore — indeed stability is not in the vocabu- 
lary of these sandy shores of southeastern 
Massachusetts. Near-by is a tablet, recording 
that Pollock's Rip is nine miles off shore, and 
that there the Mayflower turned back and 
abandoned the intention to settle on the Jersey 
coast. 

On the remnants of the old plain, down in 
the kettle-hole basins, inland and along the sea, 
uphill and downhill, Chatham has its physical 
individuality among the Cape villages, though 
one is baffled in describing it. It is an old 
town dovetailed with new things, being in this 
more in resemblance of Falmouth, and Hyan- 
nis, than of Sandwich, Brewster or Wellfleet. 

There are low, broad, shingled Cape cot- 
tages in plenty, and even more abound the 



13 2 Cape Cod 

more pretending homes of a story and a half 
or two stories, with siding on the wall, and 
heavy cornices and corner boards which might 
be in Hingham or Marblehead or any other 
New England village. The fine mansions of 
the old shipping masters are hardly so con- 
spicuous or common as in Yarmouth, Fal- 
mouth or Brewster. 

Almost every street in Chatham is solidly 
paved, and the old corner town of the Cape is 
the natural goal of the traveler coming up the 
Cape from Provincetown, or skirting the south 
shore from Woods Hole and Falmouth. One 
misses here the dense shade of most of the 
upper Cape towns but finds the big and 
spreading ailanthus, with its gray bark and 
silvery foliage. 

There is a fishing plant on Stage Harbor and 
one is rather glad to find the good old signs of 
sailmaker and some boat repair shops. They 
save the salty flavor of the place which is in 
some need of saving, for the signs of survival 
of the old life are few. It must be confessed 
that "antiques" have come into Chatham, 
along with the ' ' Blue Bunny Shop," the "Rose 
Bower," the "Tea Barn" and "Free Air." 

It must be confessed also that Chatham has 
at least one hotel where only the rich or the 
very ambitious could be expected to register, 



Old Colony Names and Towns 133 

that the old town has experienced vast in- 
creases in its tax roll, that its bread comes from 
the city rather than from the sea, and yet it 
must not be forgotten to pass on the testimony 
of a town officer, himself recalled from a life of 
many years in the interior, to spend his re- 
maining days in the places of his youth. ' ' The 
rich here are very democratic," he said. Let 
us hope he spoke the truth, for the fishing 
days and the simple days are fast numbering, 
and it is more than a chance that the mackerel 
and the lobster for which you go to its very 
haunts, have come down from Boston on the 
last train. 

The village of Orleans was around the head 
of Town Cove. The town hall was there, and 
the undertaker was there and there they are 
still — and the latter not only buries the dead 
but chisels the memorial slabs that are set up 
over them. In recent decades the village 
business has migrated westward and gathered 
around the railway station in wooden shops 
big and little. The hotels have not reached the 
tourist stage of development, being kept in 
old made-over mansions of the town. The 
ever-present public library keeps its watch and 
does its quiet service between the old and the 
new, on a triangular park at the intersection 
of the main roads. 



134 Cape Cod 

Growth is strong and luxuriant in Orleans 
where it is quite possible to gather ten barrels 
of apples from a single tree and whose elms 
would look well if they were in Andover or 
Deerfield. Not very far north of Orleans, 
Thoreau struck out on the bare beaches of 
Eastham and began his tale of wave and wind- 
born sand, and of wave and wind-beaten peo- 
ple, which left unsaid and unimagined the 
forests, the fields, the homes, and the life of 
the upper Cape. 

Three elderly men sat at the tables and 
desks in the Town Hall, in safe seclusion, under 
dull skies, industriously doing the town's 
business. The walls of this old office were 
covered with books, in which law reports were 
as predominant as in an attorney's office. 
Here were the Acts and Resolves of the Prov- 
ince of Massachusetts Bay, the Laws and 
Resolves of Massachusetts and Massachusetts 
Public Documents of various orders and de- 
scriptions. Here was the essence of New Eng- 
land, the quality of the Puritan, the survival 
of the Old Colony. The venerable town clerk 
active in body and keen in mind, with playful 
wit, at four score, said that Orleans has for 
its size more of the old population than any 
other town on the Cape. 

Like other towns in Barnstable, Orleans col- 



Old Colony Names and Towns 135 

lects a considerable part of its taxes from the 
summer visitor and property owner, but the 
quiet old place seems wholly unspoiled. There 
are no pretentious estates, no mansions hidden 
a mile in the woods of some modern manor, 
no big hotel — may the writer be pardoned if 
in error — but he doesn't think there is a golf 
course in the town. But there are beginnings 
of "development" at Tonset, and over on 
Nauset Harbor, and there are few places on 
the Cape that have more splendid possibilities, 
if it be splendid to build summer colonies, 
than the high and rolling ground that spans 
across from Town Cove to the Atlantic shore. 
But the old Orleans is here yet, and the man 
still lives in Orleans who ran the first train 
into Provincetown. 

In 1895 an elderly gentleman came back to 
Wellfleet after an absence of forty-three years. 
He had thus visited the old home in 1852, a 
time between the earlier and later excursions 
of Thoreau on the Cape. Great changes had 
come in Wellfleet between the fifties and the 
nineties. The great fleet of fishermen had 
disappeared. The harbor was as free from all 
signs of commercial life as on the day when the 
Mayflower shallop passed Billingsgate in 1620. 
The fishing wharves were falling into decay, 
and the roofs of some fishermen's cottages had 



136 Cape Cod 

dropped within the ruined walls. Instead of 
the simple Cape cottages, English and Italian 
styles had come in. 

In the middle of the last century salt plants 
and salt-making were everywhere about Well- 
fleet. There were eighty sail of splendid ves- 
sels of the old type, and there was an immense 
catching of mackerel. Oysters were brought 
up by thousands of bushels from the south to 
be planted here. All these industries had gone 
down and there was little left but a tidy village 
living comfortably on its past. 

And so it is to-day. Perhaps no other Cape 
village has changed less in the past generation 
than Wellfleet. The harbor is still there and 
the mud flats at low tide. The houses are well 
painted and nobody seems to be poor. Oysters 
and clams are still harvested but not as in old 
times. No mansions are being built and no 
estates are being laid out. There is the same 
background of salt marsh stretching far in- 
land and the same beautiful ponds lie undis- 
turbed in square miles of unbroken forest. 
The black fish are still sometimes stranded in 
the neighboring creeks, and the motor cars go 
through in greater numbers. A large summer 
inn resting over the water on piles has been 
constructed, but otherwise Wellfleet sees little 
change, keeps its dignity, and might perhaps 



Old Colony Names and Towns 137 

be envied by some other of the towns of 
Barnstable. 

If we make exception of Woods Hole, Prov- 
incetown has the only harbor on the Cape that 
keeps much significance as a haven. Its prox- 
imity to fishing grounds will always give this 
industry a place there but never again is it 
likely to be the absorbing occupation, filling 
at once the speech, the pockets and the door- 
yards of its inhabitants. All the old wharves 
save one show plentiful signs of dilapidation 
and decay and the tools of shipbuilders and 
ship-repairers are rarely heard on the shore. 

The harbor will always be used by ships. It 
is old water for the American navy, though 
gossip says war ships have declined to anchor 
there because the town authorities would not 
let the Jackies come ashore for Sunday base- 
ball. And the same gossip says that the lead- 
ing Puritans go to the Provincetown churches 
in the morning and take joyful auto trips in 
the afternoon. But pleasure will always lure 
the summer sailor thither and storms will 
drive in the winter craft. 

Provincetown has no soil to count for real 
agriculture. Tiny patches of dooryard or gar- 
den may be covered with earth brought in as 
ballast, or with mould cut from neighboring 
swamps and lake borders, but the town must 



138 Cape Cod 

subsist off the sea, and upon what it can buy 
in Boston or elsewhere. There is no back- 
ground for the farmer, there is dearth of the 
primal needs of existence as in no other Old 
Colony town. 

The isolation that once ruled here has been 
lost. The touch with the continental world 
behind is, it must be said, not very active in 
the winter, but two modest trains crawling 
down the Cape every day would have meant 
intimate fellowship in the days of old Province- 
town, even as old as Thoreau's time, when 
there were sand roads, and no sidewalks, when 
the sands were encouraged to blow under the 
houses lest they should lodge around them, 
when the dooryards were sands and the 
industries were — cod. 

What Provincetown is to-day is summed up 
in hard roads, one sidewalk because there is 
room for only one, motor cars dodging and 
grazing each other from May to September, 
the daily boat from Boston, Boston and New 
York papers, and the artist colony. 

If the visitor will refuse to see Provincetown 
in two hours, he will find that it is not all on 
one street, that there are front and rear ave- 
nues and cross-streets, and that not all the 
homes and not many of the people are 
"quaint." The resident of the Cape does not 



Old Colony Names and Towns 139 

like to be called quaint, for he and his Barn- 
stable County are just parts of Massachusetts, 
of New England, with a good showing of the 
New England sort of dwelling house and the 
average Massachusetts kind of intelligence. 
The sea may have made him in some things 
different, but he is not queer, he is not a type 
and does not care to be a subject for even the 
good-humored comments of the frequenter of 
the Hudson Valley, or the dweller by the 
Great Lakes. 

Perhaps the artist colony is unique, or at 
least a part of it. One might see men and 
women, more of the latter, of all ages, with 
canvases of all sizes, seated in all kinds of 
places, in and out of the town, on the shore 
and lost in the dunes, or marching with apron 
and palette up the street, in alley ways, back 
of homes, by every clump of hollyhocks, al- 
ways at their task or on the way. And let us 
add gently that some of them and their worthy 
and distinguished masters do uphold the 
sacred cause of art and add to ancient Prov- 
incetown what we would not see her lose. 

One need not be a painter to appreciate in 
true measure the beauty of Provincetown or 
the glory of the Province lands and their envi- 
roning sea. See the long curve from the boat's 
deck as you come or go, pass in and out among 



140 Cape Cod 

the winding and narrow streets, or ascend the 
monument by its easy inclined ways and sweep 
the horizon, the Plymouth shore, the cliffs of 
Truro and Wellfleet, the great fields of gray 
or forested dunes, the outer shore — there is no 
panorama quite like this, though mountain 
peaks may open wider vistas. Or, stand at 
Highland light, when the sun sets on the 
Mayflower calling place, and all the glories of 
the sky enfold the old town — see this, but to 
describe it, that you will not essay to do. 

On all the circuit of the Bay, Plymouth 
alone might be in some danger of outgrowing 
its old life. Yet it seems not likely to go the 
way of New Bedford or Fall River, where in- 
dustry and trade assume engulfing propor- 
tions. Old homes and historic places continue 
to rule the life and color the atmosphere of the 
first Pilgrim settlement. 

New England has enough centers of indus- 
try and it is worth while, if it may be so, to 
leave Plymouth as a goal of pilgrimage, a 
shrine at which Americans may breathe afresh 
the bracing air of the ancient courage and 
simple life of the fathers. 



CHAPTER V 

ON THE LAND 

The primary wish of the early colonists was 
to own land and raise crops. Swift, in his his- 
tory of Chatham, says that all the early set- 
tlers were farmers and they used the sea prod- 
ucts only for their own tables. Too much has 
been said about the poverty of the Cape soils. 
Thoreau has unwittingly fixed the notion that 
the surface of the Cape is all sand. He is 
perhaps to be excused, for his visits were lim- 
ited to a few days; he dragged toilingly over 
sand roads and he tramped mainly on the 
wind-swept outer zone. Thoreau supports his 
assertion by referring to Dr. Hitchcock, the 
distinguished geologist of Massachusetts, as 
authority for saying that the Cape is composed 
almost entirely of sand. 

Without doubt Dr. Hitchcock got the im- 
pression of a desert, but even he knew that 
there was "many an oasis," and he gives his 
praise to the "pleasant villages" and their 
obliging and intelligent inhabitants. Thoreau, 

141 



H2 Cape Cod 

it may in all justice be said, was not the first 
to receive and give out distorted impressions 
of the lands of Barnstable. In Letters from 
an American Farmer, written by a Pennsyl- 
vanian and published in Philadelphia in 1793, 
the writer thus delivers himself — "I am at a 
loss to conceive on what the inhabitants live, 
besides clams, oysters and fish, their piny 
lands being the most ungrateful soil in the 
world." The traveler then makes reference to 
a Cape minister whose salary was fifty pounds, 
together with a gratuity of horseshoe crabs, 
"with which this primitive priest fertilizes the 
land of his glebe, which he tills himself, for 
nothing will grow on the hungry soils without 
the assistance of this extraordinary manure." 
Within two years a writer in a book of travel 
essays on New England, says that "trees do 
not nourish on the Cape." One is inclined to 
think that he must have come by steamboat 
from Boston to Provincetown and that he 
returned by the same route. It could not be 
that he ever saw the splendid elm arches of 
Orleans, far down the Cape as it is, or of 
Brewster, the Yarmouths, Sandwich, Hyannis 
or Falmouth, and he could not have been in 
the more than respectable forests that would 
have shaded him for endless miles of driving 
or walking on the great moraines and their 



On the Land 143 

frontal plains. Even the streets of Province- 
town and the forests on its dunes are answer 
enough to this indictment of Cape soil and the 
fine forests of Wellfleet are big enough and 
high enough to lose the touch-and-go tourist 
in their wilds. 

Now it is a rather old notion, holding a good 
bit of truth, that soil that will grow trees will 
support crops more or less well, and to this 
rule the sea corner of the Bay State is no ex- 
ception. Winslow's Relation is more discrimi- 
nating than the writers we have quoted, for 
it describes the soil as variable in places — 
mould, clay, and mixed sand. This old chron- 
icler notes the lesser yield of corn than in Vir- 
ginia, and adds the very just observation that 
the difference is due to the hotter climate of 
the latter region. The corn is ''set" with fish 
because this is easier than to clear new ground. 
The writer adds that the field had to be 
watched at night for fourteen days to prevent 
wolves from digging up the fish. The men 
take turns at this and so, "it is not much." 
Fishing, says the author, is a better industry 
than tobacco. 

So it appears that the fathers knew much 
more about their country than most of the 
literary describers of the last sixty years. 
They knew the limitations and the goodness of 



144 Cape Cod 

their soils, what they would produce, and that 
some crops could be better raised than others. 

It is fair to say that much deterioration has 
taken place in the centuries, and in this fact 
lies some palliation for the unintentional 
slanders that have been placed on the Cape. 
The thinness of some soils led to early exhaus- 
tion, and the cutting of the forests opened 
many tracts to destruction of their fertility. 
Few cattle or other livestock could be kept and 
thus fertilizers were lacking. The farmers did 
the best they could with marine fertilizers, 
as in Truro, where, according to Freeman, one 
king crab with a broken shell was put in each 
hill of corn. But there was continuous crop- 
ping, and fish, shells and seaweeds could not 
repair the injury. In some places too, the 
removal of the trees gave the winds the oppor- 
tunity to tear up the soil-cover and dissipate it. 

Much corn was raised in the Old Colony, 
even as far down as narrow and storm-ridden 
Truro, where fifty bushels were often har- 
vested on an acre of ground, and fifteen or 
twenty bushels of wheat. The grain filled well 
but the corn was described as "low of stature," 
a trait which belongs to apple trees, pines, oaks, 
and goldenrods on that part of the Cape. It 
will not be forgotten that Standish and his 
men found the first Pilgrim stores of corn in 



On the Land H5 

Truro, a town of which Freeman says that 
though the soils are poor, the corn, rye and 
vegetables nearly suffice for the population. 
This record was made less than seventy years 
ago. 

The Indians raised quantities of corn in 
Eastham and the white settlers in that town 
produced it for export: From one to three 
thousand bushels were sold from the town in 
some years. Single farms raised five hundred 
bushels of grain and a yield of eight hundred 
is credited to one. Now there is a barren tract 
of seventeen hundred acres on the west side, 
with hardly a particle of vegetable mould, 
which formerly produced wheat and other 
grains. 

Freeman says that in his time corn ran from 
twenty-five to fifty bushels per acre, fifty to 
one hundred being exceptional yields. Onions, 
wheat and flax were formerly raised, these 
facts being from the account of the town of 
Barnstable. Dwight also saw in that town 
good crops of maize, rye and other grains, a 
good deal of flax, and a great quantity of 
onions. Swift in his history of Yarmouth re- 
fers to corn, rye, barley, wheat and vege- 
tables. Under the last were to be excepted 
potatoes, which came in later than the others. 
Of fruits there were apples, pears, peaches and 



146 Cape Cod 

(how suggestive of London market stalls) 
Kentish cherries. 

Every rambler on Cape Cod, if he rambled 
by foot and not by gasoline, has found fasci- 
nation in the low, wide-spreading apple trees, 
planted behind hills and in kettle holes and 
even then crouching low to escape the winds 
and holding their fair and juicy fruit where one 
must reach down to it and even lift it off the 
ground. Thoreau tells interestingly of these 
dwarfish trees, which after years of growth, 
reached the stature of shrubs, yet bore aston- 
ishing crops of fruit. Wendell Davis in his 
description of Sandwich says that the apple 
trees do not attain much height and in bleak 
situations are likely to decay in a few years. 
Some writer, referring to Orleans, says the 
greening, a low tree, succeeds best. "Fruit 
trees cannot be made to grow within a mile of 
the ocean." This simply is not true, as we 
may see well enough along the narrower parts 
of the Cape. Barely a mile from either shore 
in Truro is the small orchard, which took high 
prizes over hundreds of competitors in one of 
the Bay. State's greatest fairs. 

Nor are we to conclude that all Cape apple 
trees are dwarfs, for Orleans and Barnstable 
at least will show trees of the full stature of 
Niagara County or the Hudson Valley. The 



On the Land 147 

historian of Truro enlarges on the luxuriance 
of the apples and other fruit, including quinces. 
Of the low habit of the apple trees he says — 
"Trees not higher than a man's head will 
often throw out lateral branches twenty feet 
or more and yield freely. It is not uncommon 
for the fruit growing on the uphill side to rest 
on the ground." 

The Corey fruit farm is on the south side of 
the Pamet valley in a recess in the hills. A 
Portuguese, born in the Azores, and his son, 
gradually cleared a tract of forest, leaving a 
wooded rim on three sides, and here they have 
brought to bearing several acres of apples, 
peaches, pears and plums. The growth is 
luxuriant and the drooping branches in places 
rest their fruit on the ground. The trees were 
heavily loaded and looked like the irrigation 
growths of the Yakima valley or Western 
Oregon. The soil is sand, "worse the farther 
you go down," and is kept up with fertilizers. 
There is thorough pruning, spraying, and thin- 
ning and the fruit is marketed by auto on the 
Cape without middlemen. 

A thousand fowls are kept and the broilers 
and the eggs are sent to the Massachusetts 
General Hospital. This orchard is in the mid- 
dle of the Cape, and it is not far from a mile 
and a half either to the Bay or to the ocean. 



H8 Cape Cod 

Mr. Corey's half a thousand trees at Edge- 
wood Farm show what industry and high 
intelligence can do with the Cape soils and 
climate, and the enterprise has served as a 
model and object lesson to hundreds of gar- 
deners and farmers in the eastern parts of the 
Bay State. 

There are many gardens in exposed Truro, 
often on low kettle-hole floors in the midst of 
thin and brown pastures and acres of wild 
moor. Thus environed with a half-desert of 
mosses and wild cranberry, these small, shel- 
tered and moist plots produce all the common 
vegetables in luxuriant profusion. By the rail- 
way in Wellfleet, completely framed in forests 
of pitch pine, one gets a flying glimpse from 
the car window of one of these little paradises 
of domestic culture. On the uplands, however, 
of the lower Cape, the turnip, corn and beans 
often look the image of poverty and cast doubt 
on the sage conclusion of Josh Billings that 
"piety and white beans flourish best on poor 
site." 

The salt marshes of the Cape border, now 
offer little in the production of food for man 
or beast. In old days they were vastly im- 
portant for their salt hay, and in time to come 
they will be reclaimed and be like little 
patches of Netherlands lowland. We may 



On the Land 149 

reckon nearly twenty thousand acres or more 
than thirty square miles, as the Cape's endow- 
ment of such swamps, which the tides are add- 
ing to the land areas. They are found from 
Sandwich to Provincetown on the inner shore 
and from Buzzards Bay around the south 
shore, but are absent from Nauset to Province- 
town on the outside. The largest swamps are 
the Great Marshes of Barnstable and those 
along the Herring River in Wellfleet. 

The marshes of Barnstable seem intermin- 
able even though they are rimmed by the long 
dune range of Sandy Neck. A survey for a 
Cape Cod canal made by James Winthrop in 
1 79 1 records an estimate of four thousand 
acres of marsh there. A committee was early 
appointed in Sandwich to divide the meadow- 
lands, to give "to every man such a portion as 
shall be esteemed equal and suitable to his 
necessity and ability." The holdings ranged 
from one to forty-two acres. 

President D wight saw several thousand 
stacks of hay on the Great Marshes. This is 
much changed to-day and salt grass is little 
cut now as compared with olden times. It is 
injurious to milk when fed to cows and has 
largely been replaced by upland hay, which, 
in spite of romancing magazine writers, has a 
way of growing in the upland meadows of 



i5° Cape Cod 

Barnstable. The lonesomest thing about the 
Great Marshes in an August day, when the 
hay ought to be there, is to see groups of low 
piles, driven long ago to raise the stacks above 
the marsh, now unused and going to decay. 

No doubt there has been a decline in Cape 
farming, but it is due not so much to depletion 
of soil, as to absorption in other occupations. 
The going over to other means of livelihood 
arises from greater profit, for the staple foods 
come in from lands lying far to the west. 
Cheap transportation, richer soils and fields 
adapted to machine tillage, have wrought the 
change. This is the same story that may be 
told all over New England, and even in New 
York, where farming has been limited and 
directed into specialties of culture. 

Getting down to hard facts, Barnstable 
County has a little less than a fifth of its land 
in farms. This is less than any other Massa- 
chusetts county has except Nantucket and 
Suffolk, the latter containing the city of Bos- 
ton. Plymouth County has nearly a third of 
its land in farms, but this is less than half as 
compared with the six great counties from 
Middlesex westward to the New York State 
line. 

No county in Connecticut has less than 
three times the proportion of farm lands which 



On the Land 151 

Barnstable County shows. Even Maine with 
its enormous wilderness has but one county 
with a smaller proportion of farm lands than 
Barnstable. 

If one is looking for bread there is not much 
on the Cape that does not come from far. 
Considering the whole state in 19 10, Barn- 
stable raised one bushel of cereals in two hun- 
dred, but Plymouth County did better, with 
one bushel in about thirty-three. Remember- 
ing the frequent early stories of wheat, rye 
and barley, Barnstable in the last census had 
a paltry two acres of wheat — thirty- one bush- 
els — with no barley and only sixteen acres of 
rye. Even of corn, which was in every field 
and on every annalist's page in Puritan days, 
the Cape raised less than a half-bushel for 
each of its people. 

Barnstable and Plymouth have gone over 
to fruit and vegetables, with some attention 
to the dairy and to poultry. By far the largest 
production is in the small fruits, of which 
these two counties of the Old Colony raise 
more than three quarters of all that are grown 
in Massachusetts. If we include orchard and 
small fruits they make about two thirds of all 
the foods that come from the soil of the Cape. 

Here we have a typical adaptation to wide- 
reaching modern conditions, in a region which 



152 Cape Cod 

once had to raise nearly all of its own food. 
Now it raises what is suitable to its climate and 
its soil and fits its products to its neighborly 
markets, which are afforded by the summer 
migrants of the shore, and the great popula- 
tions of Boston and Providence. 

It would not be easy to find a better adap- 
tation of nature's conditions to a crop that one 
sees in the cranberry. The Old Colony got 
from the glacial invasion and the resulting 
break-up of old drainage lines, more than its 
share of swampy flats. It is usually easy to 
find a sand bank in neighborly relation to the 
bog, and exposure to oceanic influences has 
given a longer season without killing frosts 
than is found in most parts of the northern 
states. To be able to flood the field, to dress 
it with sand and to have a long growing sea- 
son — these are the three essentials of cranberry 
culture. 

It is not an old industry. There was an 
accidental discovery, early in the last century, 
in North Dennis. Sand blew in on a patch of 
wild cranberries and showed what it could do 
for them. The real culture of the berry began 
in 1846 and 1847 at Pleasant Lake in Harwich 
and apparently there is no town on the Cape 
which is more dotted with the bogs or more 
pervaded by a kind of cranberry atmosphere 



On the Land 153 

than this same old Harwich. If Harwich has 
rivals in the frequency of lakes and abundance 
of swamps, they are Yarmouth and Barnstable 
and all three are great cranberry towns. There 
are many in Brewster and Dennis, some in 
Orleans, and not many in Chatham. West of 
Barnstable, the crop is in moderate propor- 
tions, l in Mashpee, Falmouth, Sandwich and 
Bourne, and then come the great areas and in- 
numerable bogs of Plymouth County. All the 
Massachusetts cranberries pass in the common 
thought as Cape Cod product, though more are 
grown in Plymouth than in Barnstable. 

A Reverend Mr. Eastman of North Dennis 
published a book on the cranberry and its cul- 
tivation. Cuttings were sent thence to New 
Jersey to start the culture there. Wild cran- 
berries were used in times before its commer- 
cial development, for there was a ruling as far 
back as 1750 that no bayberries should be 
gathered until September 10, and no cran- 
berries, wild berries of course, until October 
1, under penalty of two pounds for each 
offence. 

Not many cranberry bogs can be seen on 
the Cape below the town of Orleans, though 
331 barrels were reported for Provincetown as 
far back as 1859. From Orleans up the Cape, 
however, nothing is more common or charac- 



154 Cape Cod 

teristic. You see the bogs from the railway, 
from the highways and along the by-paths. 
They are irregular in shape, running into se- 
cluded nooks and rounding the bases of gla- 
cial hills, while ditches for flooding and drain- 
age run around the border and in square pat- 
terns through the interior of the biggest bogs. 

Looking off over the field the vines do not 
seem more than a few inches in height, but 
that they are straggling and long appears 
when the harvester draws his scoop through 
them and pulls them from their lurking places 
near the ground. 

Invention has done its part in the cranberry 
harvest, for not only is handpicking almost 
abandoned, but the smaller scoop as well. 
Most pictures show the men and women on 
their knees in the bog, which during the pick- 
ing season is however anything but wet. In 
recent years the big scoop has come in. The 
scoop is about sixteen inches wide, with about 
that number of flattened tines, so spaced as to 
let the vines drag through and hold the berries. 
When full the scoop holds six quarts, and the 
pickers, giving it three or four shoves through 
the tangle, usually find it loaded with three 
or four quarts. It is stooping work, and stren- 
uous it would seem for all but muscular and 
wiry backs. 



On the Land 155 

A bushel may be picked in five minutes or 
even less, though the average time is greater. 
A good picker, working at twenty cents a 
bushel, readily earns a dollar, or even a dollar 
and a half, in an hour. An expert in picking, 
the superintendent of a big bog, a sturdy 
middle-aged Finn, said that handpicking, 
involving the opening of the vine tangle with 
the hands, was not nearly so favorable for the 
future well-being of the bog, as the scoop 
method. By the latter the vines are pulled 
up somewhat evenly, and after the removal of 
the crop, clipped off at a certain height, pro- 
viding for good and uniform development the 
following season. 

The big scoop might seem wasteful if we 
did not take account of the time and cost of 
labor. Several barrels of berries may be left 
on an acre and hand-gleaning would soon pro- 
vide berries enough for a thanksgiving feast. 
But the market value of these left-overs would 
be far exceeded by the cost of rescuing them. 
The big Finn was expecting about four thou- 
sand barrels from the forty acres of bog where 
he was opening the picking season. 

The bogs and the pickers, and the colors of 
the filled crates give zest to the September 
landscape, and a near view of the field glowing 
with ovoid jewels might easily raise an ambi- 



156 Cape Cod 

tion to own a cranberry farm. Like other 
enterprises it has its ins and its outs, its 
gains and losses. It costs to grade and plant 
and weed a bog, and when one takes account 
of flooding and frosts and insect pests of vari- 
ous kinds, of the labor involved and the vicissi- 
tudes of the market, he may well hesitate 
until sure he has the capital, the intelligence, 
and the intrepidity which any other worth- 
while enterprise demands. 

After the cranberry comes the strawberry, a 
remote second in acres and dollars and yet not 
to be forgotten. They are early — a June crop 
on the Cape, opening the small fruit season as 
the cranberry closes it, and flourishing on the 
high and dry ground, where the tangled mat 
and brilliant round berries of the hog cran- 
berry might thrive, but where the thanksgiv- 
ing fruit could not grow. Both berries there- 
fore show a definite response to soil conditions. 
There is enough upland bearing a light loam 
cover to raise in Barnstable County, straw- 
berries for all New England. 

As yet, however, there is, in a large commer- 
cial way, but one strawberry town and that is 
Falmouth. And there is but one strawberry 
raiser, the "Portugee." Seventy-three car- 
loads of this fruit were shipped from the freight 
depot of Falmouth village in the summer of 



On the Land 157 

19 1 9. This will mean more if we say that two 
to three hundred crates make a carload, and 
that a crate may hold from thirty-two to sixty 
quarts. Striking an average and doing a bit 
of multiplying, it comes out that somewhere 
near a million quarts of berries went to Boston 
and other markets. 

This is an achievement of about ten years, 
by newly immigrated men and women, and 
let it be added, by the rather numerous chil- 
dren that count in every Portuguese family. 
It is a story of family toil, of oak scrub, grub- 
bing, burning, plowing, planting, fertilizing 
and cultivation. The fields are clean, the rows 
are straight and the plants are deep green and 
strong, and in them a new phase has been 
welded into the industrial life of the Cape. 

The Portuguese have not forgotten the rasp- 
berry, and the bright red of this fruit finds its 
way out of Falmouth to the amount of fifty 
crates per day in the picking season. The 
little plantations are not without corn and 
beans for home consumption, and the thrifty 
owner, who has not been trained to be dis- 
tressed by the toiling of wife or child in the 
field, cranks his truck and goes to market over 
a state road, and moves on an economic plane 
several notches above the condition of his old 
life in the Atlantic Islands. 



158 Cape Cod 

The Cape has another gardening specialty 
in the crops of asparagus that flourish in the 
town of Eastham. One or more carloads of 
this vegetable go from the railway station 
each morning in the season and fields of sev- 
eral acres are common objects by the roadside. 
One grower in Eastham expects to increase his 
plantation from the present twelve acres to 
forty or fifty. He bought nine acres out of his 
twelve, paying five hundred dollars for each 
of them. The great ranch at Hatchville has 
eight acres in asparagus and will have five 
times this amount if present plans are carried 
out. The director of the Cape Cod Farm 
Bureau, expects asparagus to increase on all 
parts of the Cape, but he does not expect to 
see another town go as far with the culture as 
has been done by the farmers of Eastham. 

There is a new agricultural life of the Cape. 
Afresh impulse has come in old Barnstable as 
it has among the hills of Connecticut or in the 
valleys of Vermont. Some crops can be raised 
on Cape soils and it is worth while to raise 
them. The farmer can get as much return 
from a quarter of an acre of corn as he could 
formerly from two or three acres. Foreigners 
must however do most of the farming be- 
cause the natives will not. Many retired peo- 
ple live on Cape Cod, and they will not clear 



On the Land 159 

the scrub or dig in the soil, when they have al- 
ready the modest income which will support 
quiet and simple lives of comparative leisure. 

Vegetables, fruit and poultry will offer per- 
manent industries on the Cape, and the fruits 
will include apples but not peaches, which need 
more sheltered situations. Dairying can hard- 
ly be other than local and limited, because the 
amount of pasturage is small and the cost of 
imported grain is prohibitive. Cereals during 
the year of this writing quite outdid the cen- 
sus record. Indeed this has been true for more 
than one year, as in so many other parts of 
the East, because of the impulse given by the 
war to the raising of breadstuff s. A single firm 
was threshing the grain, mostly wheat and 
rye, from one hundred acres of land in the 
neighborhood of Barnstable. 

Roadside markets are coming into vogue in 
the Cape summertime, and in this there is 
the greatest variety, for some farmers, or their 
wives, can make attractive displays and others 
have no trace of this art. Those who do make 
their wares alluring can sell them at almost 
any price when so many pass with plethoric 
pocketbooks and prepared to be surprised by 
luscious fruits and choice vegetables derived, 
in spite of reported barrenness, from the Cape 
soils. So long as food is imported into the 



160 Cape Cod 

Cape during every month in the year the local 
farmer need not fear for his market. 

The farm bureau seems to be putting a new 
impulse at work, and it reaches not only the 
farmers, but the schools and junior clubs in its 
worthy propaganda. The Bureau works in 
co-operation with the Massachusetts Agricul- 
tural College and the United States Depart- 
ment of Agriculture. Thousands of persons 
have attended the various community meet- 
ings and farm demonstrations. 

Even the casual eye cannot overlook the new 
developments on the upper Cape. Old gar- 
dens have taken on fresh beauty and plenty 
of new ones have been created. The walls, 
the fences, the arbors and beds of shrubbery 
begin to remind one of the greenery of the 
English countryside, for be it remembered, a 
climate which is mild in spite of bad repute of 
New England winters, lets every season's 
growth build on the last, and does not, as in 
our continental interiors, destroy a summer's 
achievement by the zero descents of the 
succeeding winter. 

The summer resident likes to dabble in fields 
as well as flowers, and the tallest oats the 
writer ever saw stood in the shock by a summer 
mansion on the Falmouth plain. And there 
was corn, which like many other plots and 



On the Land 161 

fields of this grain in Falmouth, Sandwich, 
Mashpee and Barnstable, would have looked 
well on an Ohio or Iowa plain. The landlord 
of the old hotel by Mashpee Lake said that 
feed corn at more than two dollars a bushel 
was too much for him and he broke up several 
acres of hillside that may not have been 
plowed in forty years, and on most of the slope 
he had a fair crop coming. A neighbor's field, 
which had had a decade of careful bringing up, 
with fish for fertilizing, had corn like a forest. 

Hatchville is a hamlet in the outwash plain 
several miles north of Falmouth. One passes 
through forests to get there and finds tokens 
of rather ancient culture around the waters of 
beautiful Coonemosett. There are cranberry 
bogs around the lake above the water level, 
with pumps for flooding, and other bogs follow 
down the natural grades of the outlet valley. 
Some of the farms show excellent culture and 
a variety of crops, including apple orchards 
well laden. 

Close at hand is an example of general farm- 
ing on a large scale with application of all 
modern methods. Here are the central build- 
ings from which stretch out on the plain the 
fourteen thousand acres of the great ranch in 
which Mr. Charles R. Crane is interested. 
There is not much left to be desired in the 



162 Cape Cod 

farm buildings, which include the office of the 
superintendent, great barns- and an ice plant. 
The central feature is a herd of a hundred 
cattle, Holstein, Jersey and Guernsey. To 
drive in the fields was suggestive of the spaces 
of the West. There was a sixty-acre cornfield, 
flanked by a great pile of empty barrels. 
Wondering what they had held, the fish scales 
that still clung to the staves told the story. 
They had fertilized the cornfield, putting on the 
fish with a manure-spreader. There was good 
second growth clover, a poor meadow, a fair po- 
tato field, and eight acres of young asparagus. 
All around was oak scrub, and out beyond 
this very flat piece of the outwash plain the 
Falmouth moraine rose boldly on the north 
and west. All this is deeply interesting, and 
may mean much for the Cape. It must be 
remembered nevertheless that this type of 
model farming is not for the aspiring boy with 
no capital, and so it may be that the object 
lesson loses much of its value. It may well be 
suspected that such farming cannot pay, in 
the ordinary sense, for it can never bring re- 
turns on the vast overhead expenses that must 
have been involved. But such operations at 
least might check the imagination of polite 
scribes who find so much delight in the barren- 
ness of Cape Cod. 



On the Land 163 

Not far away at Forest Dale, reached more 
naturally through the forests from Sandwich, 
is the estate of Dr. Lombard, who combines 
ranching in Colorado with big farming in the 
Old Colony. Here are about fifteen hundred 
acres, with the central parts under cultivation. 
There were eight acres of corn, and eight acres 
of potatoes, as fine a stand as could be seen in 
Aroostook one would think, with rows stretch- 
ing half a mile and straight as a beam of light. 
This was the second crop on recently broken 
scrub. The trees are pulled with tractors and 
the plough goes in two feet, pulled by a forty 
horse tractor. Then a powerful disk is put 
over it, and right here in the middle of the 
parlor writer's Sahara, the soil, the humus- 
filled layer, was eighteen inches deep. Of 
course this is exceptional, for Cape soils are 
patchy, but it reveals possibilities. 

Mr. Frederic Tudor of Buzzards Bay is an- 
other of the growing group of progressive 
farmers on the Cape, working a tract of four 
hundred acres, and combining cattle, poultry, 
fruit, and vegetables in his enterprise. He 
thinks, however, that the future of the Cape 
region is in small, one-man farms of five or 
ten acres with the same mixed production to 
which he devotes himself on a larger scale. 

The Cape seems peculiarly fitted for nursery 



164 Cape Cod 

operations and much has been done in this 
field during a few recent years. An example 
is found in the Farquhar nurseries in Barn- 
stable, a branch of a larger establishment 
lying inland in eastern Massachusetts. The 
account of its superintendent is quite worth 
quoting as showing what can be done on lands 
supposed to be fit only for a wilderness. 

"The nursery was started six years ago, the 
land then being old pasture, and oak stumps, 
and pitch pine. The soil is good, light loam 
with spots of peat or clay. We are still clear- 
ing land as needed. We find the climate more 
even than inland and little loss from winter 
killing of plants. This district is called the 
Plains, and is about three miles from salt water 
north and south. Farming near-by is small and 
rather poor. Some of our principal crops are 
azaleas, kalmias, roses, lilacs and other orna- 
mental plants; conifers, poplars, willows and 
a general line of nursery stock. We grow a 
great many hardy liliums in all stages from 
seed to larger bulbs, also some flower and 
vegetable seed. All our crops grow well, and 
we find the soil and climate very suitable for 
this business. We have about sixty-three 
acres in cultivation." 

In the western end of Barnstable village, 
back of a comfortable mansion, several acres 



164 Cape Cod 

operations and much has been done in this 
field during a few recent years. An example 
is found in the Farquhar nurseries in Barn- 
stable, a branch of a larger establishment 
lying inland in eastern Massachusetts. The 
account of its superintendent is quite worth 
quoting as showing what can be done on lands 
supposed to be fit only for a wilderness. 

"The nursery was started six years ago, the 
land then being old pasture, and oak stumps, 
and pitch pine. The soil is good, light loam 
with spots of peat or clay. We are still clear- 
ing land as needed. We find the climate more 
even than inland and little loss from winter 
killing of plants. This district is called the 
Plains, and is about three miles from salt water 
north and south. Farming near-by is small and 
rather poor. Some of our principal crops are 
azaleas, kalmias, roses, lilacs and other orna- 
mental plants; conifers, poplars, willows and 
a general line of nursery stock. We grow a 
great many hardy liliums in all stages from 
seed to larger bulbs, also some flower and 
vegetable seed. All our crops grow well, and 
we find the soil and climate very suitable for 
this business. We have about sixty-three 
acres in cultivation." 

In the western end of Barnstable village, 
back of a comfortable mansion, several acres 



On the Land 165 

of rolling moraine lead down to the border of 
Great Marshes and Barnstable Bay. This 
small farm is a forest nursery of the State of 
Massachusetts . Work began here in 1 9 1 3 , and 
the nursery now has over four hundred seed- 
beds, covering eight acres of land. The plant- 
ings consist of white pine, Scotch pine, Norway 
spruce, larch, Douglas fir, and arbor vitae. 
About a million two-year white pines will be 
ready to plant in 1920. The nursery now has 
four million trees in various stages of growth. 
A hundred years later when two or three gen- 
erations of conservation have succeeded the 
destructive revel of the lumbermen of the 
nineteenth century, the glory of the New 
England white pine may revive, and the 
forest production become as real as it is now 
reminiscent. 

This is what industry and careful thinking 
have done on Cape lands. It was no outsider 
with money, but young Cape blood, which has 
developed the great Mayo duck farm on high 
and steep-sloping hills that look out to sea on 
the eastern shore of the town of Orleans. 

Nine years ago there came to one of the 
outer towns of Barnstable a would-be farmer 
who had never milked a cow. He bought a 
place, put a mortgage of twelve hundred dol- 
lars on it and transformed it into a modern 



166 Cape Cod 

home. Now he has a dairy of ten cows and 
four hundred head of fowl. Each laying bird 
cleared him last year, not charging in his labor, 
the goodly sum of five dollars, and his success 
has been so pronounced that he got without 
hesitation a federal farm loan of two thousand 
five hundred dollars. 

The sands of Provincetown have another 
example which sounds more like a tale than 
like truth. One eighth of an acre holds a 
house, a shed, chicken houses, a garage, two 
greenhouses, and fifty dwarf trees. Vege- 
tables grow among the trees and buildings and 
ten thousand eggs are an annual product. 
The owner has supported his family on this 
ground for nearly twenty years, and his records 
cover the whole period. He has not imported 
soil, and has never bought commercial ferti- 
lizer. These rural miracles would tax the faith 
of the prairie owner of a half -section, but are 
less unbelievable if one has compared the raw 
wastefulness of new America with the frugal 
and laborious husbandry of the old world. 

If we follow the coastal belt of New England 
from the New York border to a remote point 
in Maine, it is remarkably given over to the 
factory. Beyond Fall River and New Bedford 
however, manufacturing never got much hold 
on the shore of the Old Colony. Even Plym- 



On the Land 167 

outh is only enlivened, not vexed with wheels 
and shafts, and Cape Cod, beyond the canal 
strip, has lived on in primal simplicity. 

The only great manufacture the Cape has 
ever had depended on the proximity of the sea. 
Plymouth itself had an early trial at salt-mak- 
ing, but the fellow who was sent to Plymouth 
to make salt proved worthless, and his ineffi- 
ciency, as far back as 1624, helped to complete 
the Plymouth failure in building up a fishing 
industry. 

About all American salt before the Revolu- 
tion was made from sea water, which was 
boiled down in kettles. It took three hundred 
gallons and more of sea water to make a bushel 
of salt and to get the needed fuel played havoc 
with the slender forests in the northern parts 
of the Cape. During the Revolution the 
General Court, following an action of the Con- 
tinental Congress on the importance of salt, 
urged the coast towns to take up this industry. 
As a bushel of salt in 1783 was worth eight 
dollars, no great persuasion was needed. 

Evaporation by the sun's heat came in a 
little later, and vats were built which could be 
covered in time of rain. This was about the 
beginning of the last century. A resident of 
Dennis is said to have patented a method of 
solar evaporation in 1799. The water was at 



168 Cape Cod 

first moved by means of buckets, then by hand 
pumps, later the pumps were operated by wind 
power. Outside of Barnstable County salt was 
made at Plymouth and Kingston, at Hingham 
and Dorchester, and on the outer islands. 

The salt business seems to have reached its 
height in the years following 1830. Then 
western salt began to come in, other salt came 
from foreign lands and the cost of making it 
on the Cape rose through the increase in the 
prices of the lumber built into the vats, for 
this was pine from the State of Maine. 

Every old chronicle has much to say about 
salt and tells how numerous the plants were. 
In Truro, "salt was manufactured all along 
the shore and by creeks and coves and was 
brought down to the wharves in scows to a 
ready market." Eastham at one time had 
over fifty salt-making plants and Chatham 
had not less than eighty. Quite in harmony 
with these records, Dr. Palfrey at the Barn- 
stable bicentennial in 1839, spoke of voyaging 
for twenty miles south of Provincetown, 
"along a shore which seemed built of salt 
vats." 

The upper towns of the Cape, or at least 
several of them, took up the work even on a 
larger scale, the whole Cape using at one time 
a capital of two million dollars and producing 



On the Land 169 

not far from a third of a million bushels each 
year. Thoreau speaks of salt works "all along 
the shore." He had just come from the wider 
parts of Massachusetts and was dragging 
through the sands of Barnstable and its neigh- 
bor towns on the way to Orleans where his 
walks began. This was probably in 1849 at 
the time of his first visit. Swift, writing the 
annals of Yarmouth as late as 1884, says that 
the salt business was about at an end. The 
last salt plant in Yarmouth, operated by one 
man, was, however, making twelve hundred 
bushels of salt as late as 1885. 

Timothy Dwight, whose Cape Journeys and 
others were in print in 1823, is rarely more 
interesting than in his rather long story of salt. 
He describes the process at some length, and 
is interested in the prices and market condi- 
tions. He is sure the business cannot be over- 
done and then, assuming easily that our 
American coast is chiefly barren and otherwise 
would be thinly peopled, he foresees multi- 
tudes gaining their living in this useful manner. 
There were seven millions of people in this 
country when he wrote this diary in 181 1, and 
he discerningly prophesies that within a mod- 
erate period there will be seventy millions. 
They will all need work and they will all need 
salt. Of course therefore they will build salt 



170 Cape Cod 

vats from St. Mary's to Machias. Rhapsod- 
ically he goes on; affluence will spring from 
the sands of eternal desolation; villages will 
smile and towns will rise out of existing soli- 
tudes. Let him set before the reader in his 
own words his eloquent blending of economics 
and religion. "May not multitudes, who ha- 
bitually spend life in casual and parsimonious 
efforts to acquire subsistence, interluded with 
long periods of sloth and drunkenness, become 
sober, diligent, and even virtuous, and be 
formed for usefulness and immortality?" 

Gristmills and sawmills are among the 
earliest necessities of a new settlement. When 
the Cape began to be settled the only grist- 
mill was at Plymouth and long journeys 
through the woods were the only recourse of 
the new people of Sandwich. But carrying 
grists on backs and horse backs for twenty 
miles was intolerable, and there was water 
power at Sandwich. This was soon utilized 
and thus simple manufacture began on the 
Cape. 

The building of a mill came under a public 
permit and regulation, and was sometimes sub- 
sidized. Mills were few and the business was 
vital, hence millers were exempted from mili- 
tary service and from some other public duties. 
There is less and less water power as one goes 



On the Land 171 

farther out on the Cape. In time there were 
at Sandwich other forms of industry, and 
Freeman records the existence of a cotton fac- 
tory, a nail factory, and marble and glass- 
works. 

In Falmouth there were in time eight mills, 
one fulling and seven grist mills, most of them 
run by wind power. The Monument Iron 
Company of Sandwich was incorporated in 
1847. An Orleans windmill ground grist as 
late as 1892. One of the hotel cottages at 
Highland Light is known as the Millstone. 
The mill was on a hillock west of the light, and 
one of the great stones is now the doorstep of 
the cottage. Bricks were made at an early 
date in Plymouth and also in Scituate. 

There were other minor industries. Some 
of them were related to the forests. Whites 
and Indians were at one time forbidden to 
bark or chip the pine trees for the making of 
turpentine. Some tar was made and found a 
ready market. There were regulations in 
Truro against cutting wood to burn lime for 
export. Thus the natural limitations of the 
environment were reflected in the communi- 
ty's struggle to protect itself, and to stretch 
its small resources to cover home necessities. 

Shipbuilding was a natural and imperative 
industry, and the denuding of forests for this 



172 Cape Cod 

purpose receives frequent notices in early 
chronicles. Both pine and oak were thus used, 
and that they could be used suggests that 
there must have been better trees than now. 
Yet it must be remembered that ships were 
small, and that sticks were used which would 
be disdained by the ship-carpenter of to-day. 

A flint-glass factory was erected in Sand- 
wich in 1825; and this industry gained a per- 
manent place in Cape history, for a great 
factory was built at a later time, whose stacks 
and walls are among the first features to be 
seen as one goes upon the Cape in modern 
years. In 1854, the capital employed was five 
hundred thousand dollars, and the yearly 
product was considerably beyond that figure. 
For a long time these glassworks were the 
largest in America. The business ceased 
about 1880. 

The Old Colony coast strip is not without 
its mills and factories but it does not go in 
strongly for manufacturing industries. Yar- 
mouth has wire-work, Provincetown puts up 
canned goods, and there is a brickyard at 
West Barnstable, where some of the old glacial 
or interglacial clays of the Cape come to the 
surface. 

The only big manufacture on Cape Cod is 
at its doorway. There was a blacksmith shop 



On the Land 173 

in Bourne in 1829. It had developed into a 
machine shop in 1849; and made among other 
things, tools for use in the new gold mines of 
California. To-day Sagamore has grown up 
around the immense Keith Car Works. The 
employees fill the village and come in daily from 
miles of the surrounding country, while the 
surprised tourist, making his first journey to 
the Cape, thinks the smoke and clatter quite 
out of harmony with his expectations, and 
struggles in vain to look out on the waters of 
the Bay, because he cannot see through the 
endless chain of new and empty freight cars 
that have been rolled out on the siding leading 
toward Sandwich. 

There is a small factory far out on the Cape, 
at North Truro station, which is more in har- 
mony with its environment. Here are made 
jellies of beach plum and wild grape, baskets 
out of cat- tail flags, and trays and table mats 
out of beach grass. But the main product 
here is bayberry wax. The gray round berries, 
the size of shot, are brought in here in the 
autumn, in October and November, for mak- 
ing bayberry balm, bayberry cold cream, and 
bayberry Christmas novelties, most of all the 
bayberry candle. A bushel of berries makes 
three or four pounds of dull green wax, and a 
young woman will at all times obligingly dem- 



174 Cape Cod 

onstrate the dipping. Thirty -five dips in a 
pot of melted wax, and as many coolings, and 
the candle is complete, under your eyes. 

Every respectable large town in New Eng- 
land is supposed to have some enterprise that 
is the biggest of its kind in the world. In this 
old Plymouth runs true to type. In its circu- 
lars of industrial opportunity, the Plymouth 
boomer tops the historic interests of the place 
with the Plymouth Cordage Company, whose 
buildings are a little city in themselves. And 
you are not permitted to forget that regular 
steamers bring sisal fiber up from Yucatan 
and steam to the Company's own docks in 
Plymouth Harbor. There are large textile 
concerns also, and factories for metal -work and 
rubber, and other smaller industries. 

Still it is true that the visitor may enter 
Plymouth for two hours or for days, and not 
be disturbed by smoke or by sounds. If he 
happens to be at the right point at the right 
hour of the day, he will see hundreds of people 
leaving their work and boarding the electric 
cars for home, but still he may tread the old 
Pilgrim paths, revel in relics and records, pon- 
der above the historic dead, look out over the 
Rock upon the harbor and sand beach beyond, 
dream of the Mayflower, and of Scrooby, and 
be unmolested by modern workaday things. 



On the Land 175 

Plymouth has been enlivened and enlarged, 
but not submerged. 

Communicating to an elder citizen of the 
Cape the view that the summer business was 
the largest industry of Barnstable County, he 
was of another opinion, and thought the cran- 
berry was first and fishing possibly a second. 
Unconvinced and interpreting the kindly gen- 
tleman's conviction as loyalty to the older 
Cape, every intelligent person later encoun- 
tered was rather sure to be faced with the same 
question. In every instance the visitor's sat- 
isfaction was increased by an agreeing answer 
— the largest material matter for the Old 
Colony's foreland is the summer boarder and 
the summer homemaker. 

In other phrase, the Cape has gone over 
to the land, but only because the land is by 
the sea. It is not merely so much in board 
bills, in the weekly routine, or after the auto's 
one night sojourn; the butcher, the baker, and 
the candlestick maker do not get it all, for 
carpenters and plumbers, and decorators and 
perpetual caretakers receive a stream of money 
and the coffers of the Cape fill in a thousand 
unseen ways. A shoe dealer in Hyannis 
prided himself in his good year-round trade 
but confessed that "we'd have dull times if it 
wasn't for the summer people." Certainly a 



176 Cape Cod 

firm of Greeks in that same old village, doing 
an immense trade, wholesale and retail, in 
fruit, would have no place among the Yankees 
of that shore, if the hunger of extra thousands 
had not every summer to be appeased. 

Sandwich was said to be a place of resort 
for "distinguished persons and families" be- 
fore the days of Newport and Nahant, and 
the historian (Freeman) observes that retire- 
ment, comfort, recreation and health were 
then preferred to display and the crowds of 
modern watering places. 

There are summer crowds in some places on 
the Cape, but it cannot yet be charged that 
there is much display. There is luxurious 
comfort in home surroundings, but the utmost 
opulence has not anywhere on the Old Colony 
shores from Marshfield to Provincetown given 
itself to ostentation, or made itself offensive 
to those who would live plainly and think 
nobly by the sea. 

To visit the town hall or to find anywhere 
the town assessor, and view the tax record of 
the past thirty years, is the best evidence that 
summer industry is dominant. Falmouth in 
1872 had taxation values of less than two mil- 
lion dollars . The next twenty-five years almost 
quadrupled the total of property in the town, 
which was more than six million dollars in 



On the Land 177 

value. Another twenty-five years brought the 
figure up to twenty million. Most of the per- 
sonal property is now cut from that figure ow- 
ing to recent changes in the order of state 
and federal taxes, but the fact remains, the 
only fact that interests us here, that, it was 
not farms or fishing or cranberries, but the 
summer person who has thus added to the 
resources of this old town. 

The financial story of Chatham is the same, 
for real estate values of a little over half a 
million in 1890 have reached in 1919 a figure 
of more than two million dollars. No doubt 
Harwich, Barnstable, Yarmouth, Orleans and 
Provincetown have seen like changes, which 
show with no uncertainty what the future of 
the Cape is to be. 

Many of the summer homes, it must be 
remembered, have not been built by alien 
hands. They stand for the unforgetting love 
and loyalty of returning sons of the Cape, who 
do not come back to vaunt their prosperity, 
but to breathe the air and refresh the memories 
of their early life, or to rebuild the ancient 
homes of worthy ancestors. And it is because 
they have come that a beautiful church stands 
here and there, that public libraries are as 
common as windmills once were, and that the 
traveler is lifted out of the sand and whirled 

13 



178 Cape Cod 

over joyous roads from one end of the Cape 
to the other. 

The government map of Falmouth, whose 
survey was made perhaps thirty years ago, or 
a little more, does not show a single house on 
the road that runs from the village, between 
Salt and Fresh Ponds to Vineyard Sound. 
Now there is a succession of mansions each in 
ample grounds. The highway is macadam, 
the hedges are scrupulously geometrical, and 
some of them solid green of eight or ten feet 
in width, while others are high enough to 
afford truly English seclusion of home gods. 

Some of the inclosures are of walls, built of 
the abundant scatterings of glacial boulders, 
blooming with nasturtiums or banked with 
tall dahlias or barricades of sweet honeysuckle. 
The town shows its roof -lines among trees and 
again the landscape would be English if only 
the four-square church-tower were of stone 
instead of New England pine. 

A stroller along the Vineyard shore meets 
the ominous sign — "Private dock and bath 
houses, no trespassing." So one cannot follow 
the strand there unless possibly over a stony 
pavement at low tide. In the necessary de- 
tour, a woman comes out of a house and rows 
you across Falmouth Harbor for a small coin. 
You resume your walk, gently querying what 



On the Land 179 

a temperate comment would be on all these 
arrangements, and you are perhaps inclined to 
feel kindly to the ferry woman, and all-igno- 
rant of strand law, you wonder whether any- 
body has a real right to warn you away from 
the Atlantic Ocean. It is just one of the 
things that are not common on the Cape, and 
one might be simple and primitive enough to 
wish that the ancient democracy of this New 
England corner might be saved for all time. 

So it is that most Cape men live on the Cape 
to-day. No longer is it a land to which hardy 
sailors come from the Banks or from the an- 
tipodes, to make brief visits to their families 
and deposit their savings before the next voy- 
age. The people of to-day are landsmen, most 
of them, voyaging only to their lobster- traps 
and their fish weirs or to tong for bivalves. 
But they still breathe the sea air, their apple 
trees stand low under the gales, their gardens 
are down in the hollows, and if they do not 
live upon the legacies of their shipping fore- 
bears, they minister to those that come down 
to the sea — they are, as the learned professor 
said, amphibious still. 



CHAPTER VI 

THE HARVEST OF THE WATERS 

One might spend his summers on the Cape 
for years, and never, unless he sought it, set 
his eyes on a codfish. Yet no one doubts that 
the Cape was suitably named, or that John 
Smith, interested more in whales, found cod- 
fish, and sixty thousand of them in a single 
month. "The best mine that the King of 
Spain hath" would not, according to that 
thrifty and prophetic old sailor, offer more 
solid values. 

American fisheries were the liveliest thing 
in the mind of Europe, when that mind turned 
toward the newly found hemisphere. Thou- 
sands of fishing voyagers plowed the Atlantic 
waters before Gosnold, and Pring, and De- 
Mont s, and Smith wrote their names on the 
continental border. This was the strongest 
force that impelled the English and the French 
to plant colonies. They knew the ins and outs 
of the New England shore long before the Pil- 
grims sailed. Samoset learned his English 

1 80 



The Harvest of the Waters 181 

from fishermen, and Plymouth was the third 
name given to that place by explorers from 
Europe. 

The salt waters and the tide flats were an 
important source of food, for Plymouth and 
the other early settlements, and this supply 
was imperative in times of scarcity. But fish- 
ing was not a large industry in Plymouth; 
indeed, some of their ventures were of such ill 
luck that they said the fishing undertakings 
of Plymouth were always ' ' fatal. ' ' Sometimes 
they had to cover their losses in fish by trading 
in furs. 

Such fishing as the Pilgrims accomplished 
is an example of the force of environment, 
for the early settlers of Cape Cod had been 
farmers and artizans. It was their new home 
that sent them fishing and on commercial voy- 
ages. They did not come to use lines and 
seines. They had no apparatus or supplies 
for this industry. They did not even plan to 
settle where the fish were, but would have 
gone to the banks of the Hudson, it may be, 
if the sailing had been good. They were apt 
to fail when they tried the business, even 
while the Massachusetts and Maine colon- 
ists were catching and selling fish to great 
profit. 

The Pilgrims were glad to fish when they 



182 Cape Cod 

were hungry, and it was the cod and other 
fish, with lobsters, eels and clams, or oysters 
brought to them by the Indians, that saved 
them from starvation. The industry was well 
recognized in the early regulations and stat- 
utes. This was true even while the Old Colony 
kept its identity, and shortly after the union 
with Massachusetts, or in 1694, the General 
Court made laws concerning the mackerel and 
other fisheries. There was a duty prescribed 
of twelve pence per barrel, recognizing "the 
providence of God which hath made Cape Cod 
commodious to us for fishing with seines." 
The proceeds were turned over for the support 
of a free school at Plymouth. 

Barrels of fish in no way measure the im- 
portance of fishing in the Old Colony. Lines 
of worldwide trade began to shoot out from 
the coasts of Barnstable and Plymouth, and 
it was fishing that was behind them. This was 
the large factor in starting the round of com- 
mercial exchanges. Cape ships carried the 
fish to the West Indies, and brought back 
molasses and spirits, which the Cape wanted 
and Boston wanted. 

Here too, was the sailor's schooling. Sea- 
men by the hundreds, rather by the thousands, 
got the stern training which enabled them 
with small change of habit to pour their experi- 




PROVIIMCETOWN DOCKS WHEN THE TIDE IS OUT 



The Harvest of the Waters 183 

ence and their daring into the early navies of 
America. 

Whale fishing came in at an early date, along 
with the mackerel and the cod, and was in 
like fashion subject to the restrictions of Co- 
lonial law. The first voyagers regretfully saw 
fortunes slip away from them as the whales 
frolicked in the Bay and their ships were as 
innocent of harpoons as they were of small 
boats, and small hooks for the lesser game of 
the sea. But they atoned for early unpre- 
paredness, and the history of New England 
whaling in its later thrills and greatness, began 
in Truro, developed in Wellfleet and then cen- 
tered in Provincetown. Thence it extended 
across Nantucket Sound and Buzzards Bay to 
Nantucket and New Bedford. 

It was a public duty in Plymouth, an obli- 
gation resting on every citizen, to watch off- 
shore for whales. If a whale was sighted a 
boat was at once launched to attack. A 
"whaling ground," or reservation for watching, 
was set apart on the "North shore," which 
was in the northwestern part of the present 
town of Dennis. As time went on this watch- 
ing did not bring returns, for the whales were 
leaving the Old Colony shores, made shy, per- 
haps, and learning through some sort of animal 
wisdom, that there was greater safety in the 



184 Cape Cod 

remote and open waters. Only two or three 
whales were caught near Cape Cod in the 
year 1746. 

Thoreau, like other good travelers, read all 
he could, before he went. In the scattered lit- 
erature of the old Cape, the drift whale and the 
minister's un-whalelike salary had stirred his 
ready capacity for the ludicrous, and he gives 
us an indelible portrait of the poor clergyman 
eagerly scanning the sea from his perch on the 
shore. The minister was not the only bene- 
ficiary of the stranded whale; the school re- 
ceived its part also, for school and church and 
minister all moved on a high level of privilege 
and honor in the Old Colony. 

The drift whale was not, however, turned 
over as a pure gift of God to heavenly uses. 
Towns had their rights, and private finders 
had theirs, and human nature being about at 
its average, there was much controversy. 
Sandwich had its full share of drift-whale regu- 
lations before the town was twenty years old, 
and Old Colony riparian rights in 1654 took 
account of shore owners on whose strands 
whales were cast up. The whale killing in gen- 
eral became profitable, and, so early as 1687, 
two hundred tons of oil were exported to 
England; "one of our best returnes." 

The blackfish is a small whale which runs 



The Harvest of the Waters 185 

in schools in the Bay. A hundred or more of 
these creatures may strand themselves on the 
beach, and in the older days there was a rush 
of men and boats, if a school was sighted, to 
drive them to shore, for the valuable oil that 
their heads, or some part of their heads, 
afforded. They are not sought now, and their 
coming uninvited imposes the burden of tow- 
ing their cumbersome carcasses out to sea, 
lest their decomposition make existence intol- 
erable on the strand. Blackfish Creek in Well- 
fleet has received such a visit in recent years, 
and the sands at the approach to Province- 
town, where seventy-five of these unwieldy 
bodies lay on the beach, ranging in length from 
six to twenty feet or more. 

Sharks are not unknown on Cape Cod 
shores, though none were seen there during 
the season not long past when some lives were 
lost on the shores not far to the south. Free- 
man records the existence of shark-fishing at 
Race Point, where as many as two hundred 
were taken in a single year. 

The last two centuries have seen each a great 
development in fishing in the Old Colony. 
The earlier growth reached its height about 
the opening of the Revolution when more than 
a thousand ships swept the waters and more 
than ten thousand men were engaged. These 



186 Cape Cod 

ships and these men took a great part in driv- 
ing the French power from the American con- 
tinent, and then, smarting under measures of 
repression, they took their part in the victory 
over Great Britain. 

At the time of the Revolution, Marblehead 
was the foremost fishing town and Gloucester 
followed in its wake. Plymouth and Chatham 
were the Old Colony centers, Plymouth having 
sixty vessels and over four hundred men, and 
Chatham about half as many of each. In 
1783, however, at the close of the war, Chat- 
ham had only four or five fishing craft, but of 
sorrowing mothers and lonely widows the town 
was full. 

The Plymouth fisheries likewise were small 
at the time of peace, but by the year 1800, 
seventeen years later, there was a good meas- 
ure of revival. Cod, mackerel, and herring 
were caught, two miles of the Plymouth shore 
were lined with marks of the enterprise, while 
Spain, Portugal, and the Atlantic Islands 
afforded the markets. 

Provincetown had more than thirty vessels 
in 1802, and the sailings reached as far as New- 
foundland and Labrador. At the same time 
Wellfleet had a goodly fleet in the cod, mack- 
erel and oyster trade. Duxbury also was 
engaged in codfishing and in building ships. 



The Harvest of the Waters 187 

In the recovery of fishing after the Revolution, 
Plymouth held third place from 1786 to 1790, 
Marblehead and Gloucester being in the lead. 

The future of fishing on these shores was, 
however, by no means assured in those years, 
for in 1789, Fisher Ames found it necessary to 
champion this industry of New England, lest 
it go down to ruin. Answering the hypotheti- 
cal question — "Why, if the business is so bad, 
do they not quit it?" he quoted words often 
said in the East in those days, of the people of 
the Cape, "They are too poor to live there, and 
are too poor to remove." 

That the Cape fishermen did not stick to 
their nets and hooks is asserted over and over 
by McFarland in his history of the New Eng- 
land fisheries. There was little movement 
among this class to lands beyond the Alle- 
ghenies. Rather did they hug the sea, and 
seek out the recesses of the fiorded coasts of 
Maine, of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, and of 
Labrador. 

The next great expansion and decline took 
place in the nineteenth century, and it went 
together with the wide distribution of shipping 
among the New England seaports, both great 
and small. The Plymouth district, which took 
in not only Plymouth, but Kingston, Duxbury, 
and Scituate, averaged almost seventy ships 



188 Cape Cod 

engaged in codfishing after 1816, and this con- 
dition endured for half a century, or until 
about 1 866 . Plymouth had her mackerel trade 
also, but for a lesser time. Thousands of 
barrels were taken in 1830, but the business 
had subsided by 1850. 

Wellfleet had a large mackerel fleet, begin- 
ning in 1826, and employing seventy-five 
schooners as late as i860, continuing also for 
years after that date. During a similar period, 
there were large interests in whale, cod and 
mackerel in Provincetown. All through the 
middle of the century, Chatham, Dennis and 
Harwich developed in mackerel as the cod fell 
off. Chatham lost her codfishing when her 
harbor became shallowed with silt. The 
larger ships could not use the port, but the 
smaller mackerel boats continued to come and 
go. Mackerel were first caught for salting in 
1818, having previously been mainly used for 
bait. 

There was great decline in New England 
fisheries in the quarter of a century following 
1850, especially in offshore fishing. With this 
decline was largely lost the nursery of our 
earlier navy and the foundation of our mer- 
chant marine. There were various causes of 
the falling off in New England. Middle At- 
lantic oysters were going to the Mississippi 



The Harvest of the Waters 189 

valley. The Great Lakes had to be reckoned 
with for they were putting large supplies of 
fish on the markets of the interior. Salt fish 
from New England could not hold their place 
on the Pacific Coast when the western home 
waters abounded in halibut, and ran red with 
salmon. The railroads and cold cars at first 
helped the New England industry but later 
overwhelmed it with the competition of remote 
waters. Sardines and canning factories on the 
Maine coast did their part in cutting away the 
market for cod and mackerel. 

No small influence in the waning of fishing 
was the upgrowth of summer life on the shore. 
Who knows now that Bar Harbor in older days 
was just a fishing station? The fishing hut has 
surrendered to the summer home, while the 
fisherman serves the visitor, gives himself to 
inshore fishing, and watches his lobster traps. 
He is content to leave the deep seas, for rowing 
a dory or driving a motorboat on sunshiny 
afternoons. 

An elderly gentleman of a quarter of a cen- 
tury ago, long absent from the Cape but never 
losing his love of it or his devotion to his 
native Wellfleet, has given other reasons for 
the changed life of Cape Cod. According to 
him, one element in the change was the break- 
ing-up of the old salt industry. The decline of 



190 Cape Cod 

mackerel fishing was hastened by the desertion 
of the coast on the part of these shy fish. 
Seines were introduced, and this had the inter- 
esting result that only men could be employed. 
There was little further use for boys, who can 
handle lines but not nets, hence the boys left 
the Cape. 

There was also much unemployment in the 
winter and spring. Even good and able young 
men could not get work, and the consequent 
loss and unrest turned their steps inland. Not 
to be forgotten also were the dangers of the sea. 
The hazards of fishing, and the hundreds of 
widowed women left prematurely in their 
lonely struggle, made the young women loth 
to marry seamen, a reluctance in which their 
parents fully shared. 

Thus we come down to our day, and on the 
Cape one hears a good deal about mackerel 
and very little about cod. The mackerel is 
first in the public eye mainly because of much 
legislation. About 191 1, the mackerel indus- 
try did not show one tenth the value of twen- 
ty-five years previous. Still there were great 
possibilities, this being the mysterious fish of 
the sea, coming and going by age-long instinct, 
causing poverty in one year, and bringing 
riches in the next. 

One who has read Thoreau's story of Prov- 



The Harvest of the Waters 191 

incetown will doubtless keep the codfish in 
his memory after all else has been forgotten. 
The codfish is entwined in the older history of 
Barnstable County, and is memorialized in the 
name of the Cape. Our historian of the fish- 
eries has put into a single paragraph an epitaph 
of the cod which should be denied to no reader 
of Cape lore. 

"Of all the fish of the sea, none is dearer to 
the heart of the New Englander than the cod- 
fish. History has claimed it for her own, and 
thrown a halo about its name. For years the 
cod held supreme sway over all others of its 
kind. This was due to no sentiment arising 
from historic associations. The life of the 
colonist was staked upon the economic impor- 
tance of the codfish. The Revolution wit- 
nessed a struggle in diplomacy in which the 
codfish was the central figure. Our war for 
independence, upon the sea, was won by cod- 
fishermen from the Capes and Banks. The 
cod tells 'of commerce, diplomacy, war; of 
victories won in all three fields.' While the 
cod occupies so completely the foremost place 
in our fisheries until the second war with Great 
Britain, there arises in the more recent history, 
consideration for other fish." 

We are not to suppose that fishing has 
passed from the Old Colony. There are no 



192 Cape Cod 

ports on the inner or outer shores where one 
may not find some signs of it. Docks are de- 
caying, boats are small, and fishermen are few, 
but they are there, and will be there as long as 
salt water is an abounding home of living 
things. 

But fishing is specialized and localized, and 
no longer is the chief occupation or the con- 
suming thought of the majority. Looking out 
from Provincetown or Truro, Wellfleet or 
Brewster, one sees structures that look like 
light stockades, in the shallow waters. They 
are the fish weirs, and one may wade out to 
the fisherman's small craft in the early morn- 
ing and go to the drawing of the net. The 
catch is large or it is light, but the shining 
mackerel will be a part of it, with butterfish 
and hake and other kinds about which the 
landsman knows little. Pretty surely there 
will be some squid, which are sold for bait to 
the offshore fishermen, and some huge flat 
skates, which rather cruelly will be pitchforked 
into the Bay for the gulls to quarrel over. The 
catch is often small, but it may tax belief, as 
when four hundred barrels of mackerel were 
snared in a single weir not many years ago. 

The weirs at Brewster are shaped like a 
shepherd's crook. The fish run out with the 
tide along the shaft of the crook, and run into 



The Harvest of the Waters 193 

the hook. The tide here leaves about two miles 
of the Bay bottom bare, and the fish rarely find 
their way out of the weirs. They are carried 
out in wagons, and sent by train to Boston. 

One sees a number of large buildings on the 
shore at Provincetown, which have been erect- 
ed in recent years, as the older fishing habits 
have passed away. They are the refrigerating 
plants, of which Provincetown has several, and 
North Truro, Yarmouth, Barnstable and 
Chatham each one. They may receive the 
catch of the weirs, or such cargoes of offshore 
fish as do not go to Gloucester or Boston. 

Another sign of the fishing industry has just 
now appeared. To the apprehension of Prov- 
incetown, as it would seem, the selectmen of 
Truro have permitted the construction of a 
factory for fish waste on East Harbor, close 
to the dunes which environ Provincetown. 
Here the fish waste may be transmuted into 
fertilizers and oils. Who knows but the fac- 
tory, proving possibly a better scavenger than 
the gulls, may turn out a boon rather than a 
curse to the surfless strand of Provincetown? 

The cod and mackerel are at home in the 
salt waters and they stay there, though they 
roam widely. The herring has a different no- 
tion of existence, and varies its program with 
incursions along any thin line of fresh water 

13 



194 Cape Cod 

which will conduct it to lake or pond, in the 
months of May and June. The herring has 
attached its name to a number of these inland 
waters on the Cape, and does not allow itself 
to be forgotten in the routine of the seasons. 
One would not search far in the records of the 
towns, or attend many sessions of some town 
meetings without finding interesting records, 
now and then of stirring contests over herring 
rights and privileges. 

The outlet of the noble lake of Mashpee is 
a swift-running brook, narrow enough to jump. 
Below the road that crosses the brook a short 
distance from the lake were piled two hundred 
barrels of salted herring, baking harmlessly 
they said, in the August sun, while they await- 
ed the sending to market. There was a plat- 
form with planks on edge for a rim and into 
that enclosure the net dumped its holding, 
after spanning the six-foot channel. 

So congested is the run that a parallel chan- 
nel was cut a few feet away to afford a double 
chance at the throng of herring, hurrying up 
to the big lake. And a short distance below on 
this brook, which is Mashpee River, were more 
hundreds of barrels, a thousand in all on the 
little stream making a single season's catch. 
Any resident of the town has the right to catch 
the herring, except when, as is not uncommon, 



The Harvest of the Waters 195 

the town authorities farm out the herring 
privilege for the general profit. 

When the Cape Cod Canal was put through, 
it virtually replaced the Monumet River. 
What is left of the upper stream runs from 
Great Herring Pond, in Bourne, into the canal. 
The granite blocks on the canal borders hin- 
dered the coming of the alewives and injured 
the fisheries. A correspondence opened in 
191 7, led to the joint action of the Canal Com- 
pany, of the Town of Bourne, and of the State 
Commission of Fisheries and Game, by which 
a suitable fishway was constructed between the 
canal and the river, thus restoring favorable 
conditions. 

The freshwater fish of the Cape, while in no 
sense affording an industry, have since Daniel 
Webster's day, and no doubt long before, 
given ample sport to lovers of the rod and line. 
Trout and bass still love the pure waters of the 
Old Colony lakes and streams, and some stock- 
ing of the ponds is said to be undertaken by 
the Fish Commission at Woods Hole, and there 
is a hatchery in Sandwich for stocking with 
brook trout and the landlocked salmon. 

Something more may be added concerning 
that kind of fishery which so far as New Eng- 
land is concerned has gone into the past, and 
is already by most forgotten. Tower, in his 



196 Cape Cod 

history of New England Whaling, quotes 
Thatcher's history of Plymouth regarding the 
early settlers' doubts about staying on the 
Cape. One of the main reasons for staying was 
the opportunity to fish, for "large whales of 
the best kind for oil and bone came daily 
alongside and played about the ship." 

Secretary Randolph, in 1688, sent a letter 
to England in which he said, "Now Plymouth 
Colony have great profit by whale killing. I 
believe it will be one of our best returns, now 
beaver and peltry fayle us." Down to 1700 
no town outside of the Old Colony, except 
Nantucket, was taking whales, and Nantucket 
was a disciple of the Cape in this industry. 
The whaling always began with drift whales, 
and this led to boat whaling, a fact true of the 
Massachusetts settlements, of Nantucket, and 
of the eastern end of Long Island. A Nan- 
tucket whaler, blown out to sea in 1727, en- 
countered sperm whales, and this event broad- 
ened the industry from drift and boat whaling 
and sent the whalers to the deep. The Boston 
News Letter of 1727 refers to the change from 
shore to open sea as having now come to the 
Cape towns, thus following in a few years the 
new example of Nantucket. 

By 1737 Provincetown was fitting a dozen 
ships for the far northern waters of Davis 



The Harvest of the Waters 197 

Strait. This enterprise took from the end 
town of the Cape all but about a dozen of its 
men. Whaling continued on the Cape to the 
Revolution, at whose beginning Wellfleet, 
Barnstable and Falmouth had thirty-six ves- 
sels, mostly in northern waters. New Bedford 
appeared in the industry not more than fifteen 
years before the Revolution. 

The business was about destroyed as was 
other fishing at the end of the war, and the 
towns were well-nigh bereft of vessels and of 
all other equipment. The whales, however, 
had had a rest, had grown more numerous 
and more tame, and there was some revival 
in which Wellfleet and Plymouth had a share. 
There was, however, no complete recovery un- 
til the War of 1 8 1 2 had passed. Then growth 
began, coming to its height in the forties, with 
about six hundred vessels in the Atlantic, 
Pacific and Indian oceans. 

After 1830 regular fleets went out from Fal- 
mouth and Plymouth, Provincetown coming 
in strongly somewhat later. Since 1895 Bos- 
ton, New Bedford and Provincetown have 
been the only ports at which even a remnant 
of whaling survived. Some readers would like 
to know the years of last sailings for whales 
from the various Cape towns. Here they are — 
Barnstable, 1846; Truro, 1852; Falmouth, 



198 Cape Cod 

1859; Sandwich, 1862; Wellfleet, 1867. I n a 
short quarter of a century the Cape lost all 
its whaling except from Provincetown. 

In 1906, New Bedford had twenty-four 
ships, San Francisco fourteen, and Province- 
town three. Six whalers are even at the pres- 
ent time assessed in Provincetown, but they 
fit out and land at New Bedford. The Civil 
War, like the wars of 1776 and 1812, broke up 
the whaling in destructive fashion and the min- 
eral oil of Pennsylvania assured the end. 

The seas are vast, and they so abound in 
life that we stop with our conservation ideas 
at their borders. Yet we have seen how even 
the whales profited by something like a closed 
season, widely as they roam and feed and mul- 
tiply . But conservation is needed at the shore- 
line, and this is the burden and cry of those 
who report each year to the Commonwealth 
of Massachusetts on the state of the mollusk. 
It is all summed up in the phrase, "the fast- 
declining shellfish industries." 

Cape Cod is the dividing line between the 
northern and southern types of marine life. 
Here the two faunas mingle, and hence it is 
that on the Cape the northern or soft clam 
and the southern hardshell clam or quahaug 
overlap. The bays and estuaries of the Cape, 
like those of the rest of Massachusetts, are 



The Harvest of the Waters 199 

favorable for these edible shellfish, but thou- 
sands of once productive acres are now barren. 

The official writer thinks that the forefathers 
who evinced such comfortable satisfaction in 
"sucking the abundance of the seas" were 
extremely wasteful. The production, indeed, 
was twice as much in 1907 as in 1879, but this 
does not mean an increased natural supply. 
It does mean that high prices took more men 
and more money into the work, conditions 
which can but hasten the process of destruc- 
tion. 

One writer cites specific cases of decline on 
the Cape, as of the oyster at Wellfleet, the sea 
clam at Dennis and Chatham, the scallop in 
Buzzards Bay and at Barnstable, and the clam 
and quahaug on many Old Colony shores from 
Duxbury around to Buzzards Bay. The order 
of shellfish departure is simple, and unless 
ample things are done, inevitable. It is heavy 
demand, then over-fishing and decline. A fur- 
ther means of destruction is the pollution of 
shore waters with sewage and factory waste. 

Plymouth is the northern limit of the hard- 
shell clam or quahaug. The largest fisheries 
on the Old Colony coast are at Wellfleet, Or- 
leans, Eastham and in Buzzards Bay, but 
there is a decline almost everywhere. An evi- 
dence of the waning of the industry is the 



200 Cape Cod 

employment of sixty-foot rakes, to raise the 
bivalves from that depth of water. The small 
sizes, or "little necks" are taken because the 
market demands them, the big ones are not 
left for spawning, and so the destruction goes 
on. 

The adoption of cultural methods, or "qua- 
haug farming" is urged as the remedy, and 
the town laws in the quahaug centers now look 
in this direction. High-power seine boats are 
now used off Orleans in the deep water qua- 
haug fishing that prevails in that shore. The 
main season runs from April to November, and 
fits itself to the winter season of taking 
scallops. 

Those who are devoted to some special cor- 
ner of the Cape will find in the reports of the 
game commission the hard-clam story in de- 
tail for every town, including a half-dozen 
pages on Wellfleet, the 'seat of the finest 
quahaug industry in Massachusetts," there 
being twenty -five hundred acres, nearly the 
whole harbor, save where there are oyster 
grants. Here the laying out of the plots is said 
to have aroused the usual hostility between 
the oystermen and the quahaugers. 

Scalloping is a'southshore industry on the 
Cape, centering mainly in Chatham, Harwich, 
Dennis and in Hyannis Bay, and Cotuit in 



The Harvest of the Waters 201 

the town of Barnstable. Buzzards Bay, Mon- 
ument Beach and Cataumet are other haunts 
of this graceful bivalve. Dennis has over two 
thousand acres of scallop ground, a field which 
is likely to produce in one year and be barren 
the next. 

In 1904-05 Dennis had, so one reporter says, 
one of the largest beds of scallops ever known 
in Massachusetts. Profits ran high and ex- 
pectation likewise, but the next spring all the 
leftovers of this short-lived creature were dead 
and the catch of that season had to be dredged 
from deeper waters. 

The oyster business is carried on with more 
system and greater success than the other 
shellfish ventures. It is also a southshore in- 
dustry on the Cape and, indeed, in the State 
of Massachusetts. Exceptions on Cape Cod 
are the oyster grants of Wellfleet, Eastham 
and Orleans. 

In early days there were many natural oys- 
ter beds, as at Wellfleet, where the primitive 
settlers found enough for themselves and for 
some outside trade. A few native oysters are 
still found in Harwich, at Centerville and in 
Falmouth. No natural oysters, however, are 
in these days secured for market use. The 
destruction of these beds was due to overfish- 
ing and the pollution of the waters. The natu- 



202 Cape Cod 

ral bed at Wellfleet was exterminated by the 
year 1775. The early oystermen took all the 
large oysters, leaving none for spawning, and 
they did not restore to the beds the empty 
shells, which furnish the best surfaces for oy- 
ster "spat." The few natural beds which are 
still in existence, are preserved through spawn 
from oyster grants, and hence it is confidently 
believed that the adoption of a farming system 
has saved the creature from absolute extinc- 
tion in Massachusetts waters. 

Following the period of natural oysters 
which lasted from 1620 to 1840, there was an 
interval of thirty years of bedding small oys- 
ters brought from the South, but the grant 
system has prevailed since 1870. One of the 
chief Cape centers is at Wellfleet, yet even 
here the industry is on the decline. The qua- 
hauger, it is claimed, is busy in town affairs, 
and is opposed to renewing the oyster leases 
when they run out. Indeed Wellfleet supports 
a quahaug club, enrolling about all the diggers 
of this mollusk. Poor, quiescent oysters and 
clams — they are set against each other by that 
higher order of being who in his ascent has 
lost their gentle art of minding their own 
business. 

Chatham goes considerably into oyster rais- 
ing, but the great oyster town of Massachu- 



The Harvest of the Waters 203 

setts is Barnstable, whose oyster grounds are 
at Cotuit, Marston's Mills, and Osterville, 
Cotuit being first in importance. Here the 
Bay is said to have remarkably pure waters, 
and a clean sand bottom, producing a specially 
bright and clear shell. There are small grants 
in Falmouth, in Waquoit Bay. This town 
does not, however, go far in any of the shell- 
fish industries. 

Unlike the oyster, or quahaug, the soft-shell 
clam, or "long neck," dwells along the north- 
ern shores of Massachusetts, and is found all 
the way from Salisbury and Newburyport to 
Salem, Hingham, Duxbury, and Plymouth, 
and around the Bay to Provincetown. It also 
occurs in Buzzards Bay and on some south 
shores of the Cape. Its story is likewise one 
of decline, although immense fields of tidal flat 
invite an industry that has almost ceased. 
Much the same is true of Kingston and Plym- 
outh, where in early days the sea food saved 
the colonists from perishing. 

The Virginian cannot forever raise tobacco 
on the same bit of coastal plain, and the prairie 
farmer finds an end of wheat and corn from 
unrequited soil. Even the vast and elusive 
sea must be treated with discretion. No doubt 
the Cape Codder will continue to dig a pail of 
clams for his supper, and the picnicker will for 



204 Cape Cod 

long be able to buy, down by the harbor, a 
basket of oysters in the shell for a roasting 
bout by some lake in the Wellfleet woods. 
But when he goes in for business, the Cape 
fisherman, like the Cape farmer, must put his 
wits into the game and work and forecast in 
the long range. 

Conserve and be mindful in good conscience 
of future generations. They will want oysters 
and quahaugs, mackerel and cod, and they 
may need even whales. The Mayflower fa- 
thers could suck the abundance of the seas 
but their children proudly looking over their 
genealogies in the eighth and ninth generations 
must mind their soils and their sea bottoms. 
It is a delicate task to live well in relation to 
the earth mother and in due regard for all 
her children. 



CHAPTER VII 

ROADS AND WATERWAYS 

Cape Cod is neighborly to che beaten tracks 
of the ocean. Nobska Light is on the south 
shore at Woods Hole. Here converges the 
coastwise traffic of Boston, New York, and the 
South, here come ships from Buzzards Bay 
and the Canal, from Nantucket Sound and the 
outside of the Cape, from Long Island Sound — 
thirty thousand of them in all, passing the 
light in the space of a year. The joy of the 
Cliffs of Truro is in the solitary grandeur of 
the ocean, but that joy is tempered, human- 
ized, and made kindly, the solitude is broken, 
for one sees sails by day and lights at night — 
fisher craft, freighters puffing through solitary 
funnels, and a mile of coal barges, three, some- 
times four, spaced a thousand feet or more, 
following a tug whose power seems out of all 
harmony with its size. The barges are high 
on the water, going south, or with hulls deep 
down, aiming their black cargoes at Boston, 
Salem, Newburyport,Portsmouth, or Portland. 

205 



2o6 Cape Cod 

Ships are few at Plymouth. One may look 
out all day over the rock, seeing only a few- 
diminutive fishermen, a motorboat, a chance 
yacht of some wealthy pleasure seeker, and, 
if in summer, the daily excursion steamer from 
Boston. The look of things is more ocean-like 
if one goes down the Cape to Provincetown. 
Fishing was small at Plymouth and out of 
fishing grew the larger trading life of the Cape. 
Plymouth stayed by its agriculture and devel- 
oped its manufactures down to our day. It 
has never been so thoroughly mixed with the 
ocean as the narrow and exposed foreland 
which springs from it. 

Sandwich, the basal old town of the Cape, is 
somewhat like Plymouth, and is said to be less 
maritime than any other town on the Cape. 
Surely a look at her desolate water front makes 
it easy to believe it, and there is evidence 
enough that manufacture ruled in the past as 
farming and summer resting to-day. Yet 
there was at one time some shipbuilding here. 
And Sandwich is credited with the first packet 
running to Boston, a service maintained for 
many years, until the venerable town saw its 
first steam cars in 1848. 

Woods Hole, let it be remembered, provides 
Falmouth with that town's most important 
harbor, a haven not situated to favor Boston 



Roads and Waterways 207 

trade, but a central shipping place for New 
Bedford, and the outer islands, wood for Nan- 
tucket having loaded many a boat from its 
docks. Falmouth had, nevertheless, a worthy- 
share in the wide trade of the older days. 
Sixty vessels were owned there in 1800, and 
their sailings reached, for fishing and the coast- 
ing trade, such remote regions as Belle Isle, 
the Southern states and the West Indies. 

It is quite within the range of possibilities 
to look out over the broad surfaces of Barn- 
stable Bay, and in some hours not see so much 
as a rowboat. A century has made a complete 
change in Barnstable's mode of life. The old 
town once had several shipyards in which 
Boston packets were built. There were fre- 
quent trips between the Cape capital and the 
State capital in 1806, and there was little 
besides marine activity in 1839, the time of 
the bicentennial celebration. There were two 
hundred and fifty of Barnstable's citizens who 
were at that time either masters or mates 
of vessels. 

The Bay State's honored jurist, Chief Jus- 
tice Shaw, at the Barnstable celebration, 
looked out on Sandy Neck and called it ''a 
range of sterile sand hills interspersed with a 
few patches of brown woods and swamps, and 
surrounded by marshes." But to the Cape 



2o8 Cape Cod 

Cod man what is suggested? — the "ocean that 
lies beyond, the field of his industry and enter- 
prise, of enjoyment and improvement, even of 
social and intellectual improvement, connect- 
ing him with all lands, art, knowledge, refine- 
ment, civilization. The land and the sea are 
alike fertile to those that have the hardihood, 
the skill, the enterprise to improve them, and 
the hearts to enjoy them." 

Such is the glory of Barnstable's history, but 
a new chapter is in the writing to-day, less 
arousing than the older story, more in the 
fields, and the end not seen. It is half a cen- 
tury since Barnstable retired within herself, 
for the great traffic had ceased at the time of 
the Civil War. 

Every town, going farther out on the Cape, 
was through and through marine. None of 
them needed any solicitude, as Thoreau ex- 
pressed it for himself, about "getting the sea 
into" them. Yarmouth, Dennis, and Brew- 
ster all front on the innermost corner of the 
Bay. None of them have harborage to boast 
of, but what they had was suited to the modest 
craft of the old time. These little havens 
were never idle. Dennis had in 1837 a hun- 
dred and fifty skippers sailing from American 
ports. And Dennis had been running boats 
to Boston almost a hundred years at that time. 



Roads and Waterways 209 

Yarmouth had her regular Boston packets 
before 1800, but their traffic was at an end 
in 1870. 

One wonders if Brewster's slumbers are 
ever broken after the summer automobile has 
run its course. Innocent of smoke or factory, 
setting a few nets in her fish weirs, and living 
in gracious old mansions, under magnificent 
arborescent growths in that poor land in which 
"trees do not flourish "—something has hap- 
pened in Brewster, or has ceased to happen. 
The time is no more when she had more sea 
captains on foreign voyages than any other 
town in the United States. No doubt, those 
foreign voyages account for the mansions. 
None would dispute Freeman who says that 
Brewster was noted for shipmasters, having 
not much fishing but vast coasting and foreign 
trade, and adding an observation which if not 
startling is safely veracious, "one of the most 
agreeable towns on the Cape." 

All of Harwich's ocean contact is on the 
south shore, but the town had shipping enough 
to cause someone to assert that her retired 
sea captains were as thick as cranberries. If, 
as we suppose, the cranberries of Harwich 
were intended, no more could be said. 

Even more fully absorbed by the sea, were 
the outer towns. In Orleans the land was 



14 



210 Cape Cod 

tended by old men and small boys, all between 
the ages of twelve and forty-five being occu- 
pied on the sea. Adjoining Orleans is East- 
ham, whose asparagus fields and coast swamps 
offer no hint of ships, yet the town boasted 
coasters that in summer brought lumber from 
Maine and in winter voyaged to the West 
Indies. Both Orleans and Eastham shared 
in the useful traffic of delivering Cape salt on 
Boston wharves. 

Chatham was less favorably placed for the 
Boston traffic, which she maintained mostly 
by inside routes through Brewster and Or- 
leans. Chatham was well situated for Nan- 
tucket and New Bedford trade and ran boats 
even to New York. Wellfleet and Truro could 
not escape their shipping destiny, while the 
sailing ship ruled the seas. The Truro men 
were especially exposed to sea dangers. All 
were of that occupation, at home in a narrow 
land, with dangerous shores, and often lost in 
wrecks, and in heroic efforts of rescue. There 
was much traffic with Boston, but the silting 
of the harbor of Pamet and the decline of 
fishing ended the business before the railway 
was extended so far out. Yet in 1830 Truro 
boasted a schooner whose cabin was fitted 
with birdseye and mahogany and hung with 
silk draperies. 



Roads and Waterways 211 

Provincetown did not begin its larger trade 
until some years after the War of 1812, but 
has maintained importance as a haven, while 
all other Cape ports save Woods Hole have 
passed into quietude. Fishing will always 
bring some shipping into Provincetown har- 
bor, the navy is likely to use it in times of 
peace, and sure to come in days of war, and 
all ships which ply the adjoining waters may 
take refuge from storm. 

The arrival of the packet in the early half 
of the last century was the excitement of the 
time, bringing the news, and bringing also 
Cape sailors whose real voyages began and 
ended at Boston. There was keen rivalry for 
speed among the packets of Barnstable, Yar- 
mouth and the other towns. There were 
packets running before 1800, but the adoption 
of regular sailings belongs almost wholly to 
the nineteenth century, coming to an end with 
the advent of the Old Colony Railway. 

The elderly man, already quoted, who had 
spent his youth on Cape Cod, in a communi- 
cation of 1897, says that before he left Well- 
fleet in 1852, he saw at one time eighty sail of 
the most perfectly constructed vessels of their 
kind in the world riding at anchor in that port. 
He returned after forty-three years and looked 
out from Indian Hill to see the waters as bare 



212 Cape Cod 

as when the Mayflower shallop passed the posi- 
tion of Billingsgate Light in search of a per- 
manent home for the Ley den Pilgrims. 
Wharves were decaying, the fishermen's cot- 
tages were falling in, and in the town Italian 
villas and English houses were replacing the 
old Cape cottages. Truly, in a recent summer 
afternoon in Truro, on a walk to the ancient 
cemetery, did the now venerable daughter of a 
still more venerable sea captain say, "Cape 
Cod ain't what it used to be; it's going down 
fast." 

The changes of the Civil War threw the 
young men into other than Cape business. 
Domestic coast trade took the population to 
the south shore, small sloops and schooners 
gave way to large craft, machinery displaced 
men, and fishing concentrated in Boston, 
Gloucester and Provincetown. Emigrants 
poured out to Maine, the Connecticut Valley, 
the Middle States, the Prairies and California. 

Often quoted, but deserving a place in every 
memorial of old Cape days, no words will ever 
say more eloquently than these what that far- 
flung life was. They were spoken by Dr. 
Palfrey in his Barnstable oration in 1839 — 
"Wherever, over the world, you see the stars 
and stripes floating, you may have good hope 
that beneath them someone will be found who 



Roads and Waterways 213 

can tell you the soundings of Barnstable, or 
Wellfleet, or Chatham harbor." Another 
Cape writer cites as suitable to his native 
shores, Burke's tribute to old Yarmouth on 
the North Sea — " No sea but what is vexed by 
their fisheries, no climate that is not witness 
to their toils." 

A shipmaster twenty years ago told a won- 
dering lone passenger of how he must sail by 
watch and compass the tortuous and rocky 
course on the return journey from Iona to 
Oban south of the Island of Mull. But no 
stern coast was perhaps ever, or anywhere, 
more hazardous than the sea borders around 
Cape Cod. There is an average duration of 
fog on this coast of forty-five days in the year. 
Anyone knows what this means who has spent 
weeks or months under the Cape's greatest 
light and has heard the low roar of its fog- 
horn day and night. 

The tidal currents are variable, and the bot- 
toms rapidly change in a region where so much 
sand is supplied to the waves and readily 
shifted to a prodigious extent in single storms. 
There are extensive and dangerous shoals far 
out and reaching to the Nantucket light ship. 
Most of the larger vessels go wholly outside of 
the shoals, and in a long week's time the so- 
journer at Siasconset might not see a single 



214 Cape Cod 

ship, or if he did, more than likely it would be 
in the service of the United States Coast 
Survey. 

The alternative sailing is through Nantucket 
Sound, entered or left by a narrow and sharply 
turning course through the shoals, endangered 
by fogs and cross currents. No place of refuge 
is available between Provincetown and Vine- 
yard Haven. No other part of the American 
coast has seen so many shipwrecks in the past 
fifty years. . From 1875 to 1903 there were 
six hundred and eighty-seven shipwrecks on 
or near the Cape. More than one hundred 
lives were lost, nearly two hundred of the ships 
were not saved, and the property loss was more 
than two million dollars. 

From 1907 to 191 7, there were one hundred 
and fifty-six wrecks on the ocean side of Cape 
Cod. If we consider the Nantucket Shoals, 
the island and the sound, and Martha's Vine- 
yard and its sound, there were in that period 
of ten years casualties involving two hundred 
and fifty-five sailing vessels, and seventy-one 
steamships, or in all three hundred and twen- 
ty-six salt-water craft. Here the loss was 
thirty-two lives, and in property more than 
one and a half -million dollars. In the single 
year 1909, on the exposed face of the Cape, 
alone, there were twenty-two wrecks. About 



Roads and Waterways 215 

the same number of ships met disaster in each 
of the years 191 1, 1912 and 1913. 

Means of safety have long been taken, grow- 
ing in perfection to the present time, though 
no human precaution can curb the sea or put 
its dwellers beyond hazard. A lighthouse was 
erected in Plymouth Harbor about 1770, but 
for long around the Cape, the sailors had 
learned by day, at least, to guide their course 
by hilltops, windmills and the church steeples. 

The Reverend Levi Whitman thus wrote to 
the Reverend James Freeman on the need of 
a light at the Clay Pounds, where Highland 
Light now is. ''That mountain of clay in 
Truro seems to have been erected in the midst 
of sand hills by the God of nature on purpose 
for the foundation of a lighthouse, which, if it 
could be obtained in time, no doubt would 
save millions of property and thousands of 
lives. Why then should not that dark chasm 
between Nantucket and Cape Ann be elimi- 
nated? Should there be a lighthouse erected 
on this high mountain, it would be discovered 
immediately after leaving Nantucket light and 
would be a safe guide round the Cape into 
the harbor." 

A light was established here in 1797, and 
since June 12 of that year the beacon has 
lighted the surrounding waters on every night 



216 Cape Cod 

of almost a century and a quarter. The tower 
rises about eighty feet above its foundation, 
which in turn is about one hundred and forty 
feet above the sea. The present structure 
replaced an earlier one in 1857. Whether 
looking in the direction of Sankaty Head, or 
the Boston Light, or Cape Ann, the distance 
for each is a little more than forty miles. 
Barring a foggy atmosphere, therefore, the 
"chasm" of the oldtime clergyman is bridged, 
and the coastwise mariner would always be 
able to pick up one of these lights. The light 
has 182,000 candle power. No other oil-burn- 
ing light in America is so powerful, and its 
flashes may, it is said, be seen under favorable 
conditions, at a distance of forty-five miles. 

This major beacon is officially the Cape Cod 
light, but the local name is used more com- 
monly, at least on the Cape. Other lights fol- 
lowed at short intervals. In 1806, twelve 
acres at Chatham were given to the govern- 
ment for lights. Race Point light dates from 
1 816, and the light on Long Point at the very 
tip of the Cape was set up in 1826. Billings- 
gate Point, off Wellfleet, in the Bay, once a bit 
of the mainland, now an island, became the 
site of a light in 1822. Lights were installed 
at Nauset in 1838, thus giving a series at short 
intervals for all the outer Cape shore. In 1849 



Roads and Waterways 217 

a light was established in Pamet Harbor, but 
this was discontinued in 1855, probably on 
account of the silting of the harbor and the 
decline of shipping. Wood End light dates 
from 1873, and other beacons are found at 
Monomoy Point, Hyannis, at Nobska Point 
by Woods Hole and at Wings Neck, on 
Wenaumet Neck in Buzzards Bay. 

Lightships also aid the sailor, at Shovelfull 
Shoal, a little east of the southern tip of Mono- 
moy ; in Pollock's Rip, about five miles east of 
the end of Monomoy Beach; also Bishop and 
Clerks, three miles south of Point Gammon; 
and Cross Rip Shoal, south of Osterville and 
Cotuit. 

On an earlier page was found a reference to 
an old description of those east and west val- 
leys which form a significant feature of the 
geography of the lower Cape. This descrip- 
tion occurs in a fifteen-page pamphlet printed 
in Marlboro Street in Boston in 1802. It was 
written by a "Member of the Humane Soci- 
ety," and this public-spirited gentleman was 
none other than the same James Freeman who 
received his brother minister's letter about a 
light at Clay Pounds. 

The title of the pamphlet is "A description 
of the Eastern Coast of the County of Barn- 
stable from Cape Cod or Race Point to Cape 



218 Cape Cod 

Malebarre, or the Sandy Point of Chatham." 
The object of the writing is to indicate the 
spots on which the trustees of the Humane 
Society have erected huts and other places 
where shipwrecked seamen may look for shel- 
ter. Various gentlemen of Provincetown and 
Truro had promised to inspect these huts, and 
see that they were kept in condition as 
shelters. 

There was but poor chance of a stranded, 
water-soaked, and freezing sailor finding one 
of these huts ; having to go up the cliffs, often, 
it might be, in driving sand or sleet, over the 
moors. Only a few months ago the captain of 
one of the life-saving stations said to an in- 
quiring visitor that if one of his crew on winter 
patrol were lost in a night snowstorm it would 
be useless to go out and look for him until 
morning. 

If the shivering wanderer found the hut, it 
would be a "rude charity house with fireplace, 
wood and matches, straw pallet and signal 
pole." One wonders if the gentlemen of Truro 
and Provincetown always kept their promise, 
and if the wood and matches were always 
there. These dread mischances that were in- 
volved in the provisions of benevolent minded 
members of the Humane Society much inter- 
ested Thoreau's inquiring mind, and he carries 



Roads and Waterways 219 

his rather weird speculations through many 
paragraphs which anyone can follow who reads 
the later pages of his chapter — "The Beach." 

All this is changed to-day, and the outer 
shore is fringed with life-saving stations, nine 
in all, running from Race Point by Peaked 
Hill Bar, Highhead, Highland, Pamet River, 
Cahoon Hollow, Nauset Beach and Orleans 
Beach to Monomoy station. The first six are 
within a distance of twenty miles, so that not 
more than three or four miles is the interval 
between any two neighboring stations. At 
each is a comfortable outfit of buildings for 
equipment and housekeeping. The captain 
and his crew are their own housekeepers, and 
very good housekeepers they are. They are 
all true and sturdy men, and are a part of the 
naval service of the United States. 

Some leisure and much quiet living, they 
have, which is likely to be broken any moment 
by a call which puts their lives in jeopardy. 
But notions of leisure in their task come mostly 
to the summer visitor, who does see them fight 
mosquitoes, but does not often see them battle 
with storm. They launch a lifeboat in the 
same composure with which they visit their 
lobster traps, and their patrols meet each other 
midway between stations, during the darkest 
and wildest nights, with booming surf, driving 



220 Cape Cod 

snow, and that deathly chill of a salty gale for 
which the thermometer has no measure. If 
leisure they do have, it is broken by scrubbing 
and cooking, tending a garden in a nook among 
the sands, or a call to practice with the cannon, 
the life line, the cable, and the breeches buoy. 
In emergency, the telephone brings two or 
three crews with great speed to the scene of 
disaster, and a long record of rescue stands 
to the credit of those heroic men. After a 
reasonable period of service, for such duty is 
too heavy for old men, they are retired upon 
a living pension. 

The anticipations of great canals have usu- 
ally been remote. Those of Suez go back thou- 
sands of years, and those of Panama through 
all the hundreds of the white man's presence 
in the western hemisphere. In this regard, 
Cape Cod is not greatly behind Panama. The 
first sentiment grew out of the trade carried 
on across the base of the Cape, through the 
valley of old glacial drainage, between the 
business men of Plymouth and the Dutch mer- 
chants of the lower Hudson. 

In 1627 a trading house was built in the 
present town of Sandwich, by the Plymouth 
colonists. Goods were carried up the creek 
from Scusset Harbor to a point within four or 
five miles of the trading house. They were 



Roads and Waterways 221 

then portaged for a short distance and put into 
boats on the other side. Thus the trade was 
spared the dangers of going around the Cape. 
Whether the goal was the Hudson or the south 
shores about Narragansett and on Long Island, 
the trading station was in the future Sand- 
wich but specifically was at Manomet. The 
Dutch began to bring goods in 1628 — sugar, 
Holland linen and various stuffs — for which 
at first tobacco was taken in exchange. This 
trade had assumed quite large proportions by 
the year 1634. 

Governor Bradford had gone to Manomet 
as early as the winter of 1622-23 and had dis- 
covered the facility with which transportation 
could be carried on between the two great 
bays, there being a tidal creek on one side and 
a river on the other, with a portage of but four 
or five miles. 

Freeman refers to an action of the General 
Court authorizing a survey for a canal between 
Buzzards Bay and Barnstable (Cape Cod) 
Bay, to avoid enemy ships and the shoals en- 
countered in going around the Cape. This is 
apparently the action referred to by Weeden, 
who says, "in 1697, by decree of the General 
Court, the Cape Cod Canal was cut, on paper, 
through the land at Sandwich, from Barn- 
stable Bay, so called, into Monument Bay." 



222 Cape Cod 

There is an interesting journal of a survey 
made in 1791, for a canal across Cape Cod, by 
James Winthrop. This gentleman lived in 
Cambridge, and he tells us that he set out at 
one p.m., May 12, 1791, with Henry Parker 
as assistant, to survey Sandwich Neck. He 
does not neglect to mention that Miss H., 
"a lovely girl of eighteen, was polite enough 
to take this opportunity to visit her Barnstable 
friends, and rode in the chaise with me." The 
first lodging was at Hingham, twenty-three 
miles out, where the food was good, but the 
beds were objectionable. May 13, the party 
dined at Kingston, and, because of rain, spent 
the night there. Plymouth was reached May 
14 and Sandwich May 16. 

After recounting the details of the line of 
levels carried across the Neck, the surveyor 
describes a journey to Barnstable to view the 
ground between Barnstable Harbor and Hy- 
annis. In crossing here, the first mile is high, 
estimated at eighty feet. There is no avoiding 
it, the hill being a part of a ridge (the great 
moraine as we know it) which runs the whole 
length of the Cape. Mr. Winthrop considers 
the use of Great Pond and Long Pond, as parts 
ot a canal, also Hathaway's Pond. He re- 
marks on the view of both seas from Kidds 
Hill on the return by the road to Barnstable, 



Roads and Waterways 223 

and notes the difference in the amount and 
time of the tides on both sides of the Cape. 

The canal project is said to have been fa- 
vored by Washington, and various routes were 
surveyed, including Sandwich, Barnstable 
and Yarmouth. Wendell Davis, in his "De- 
scription of Sandwich" in 1802, refers to two 
of these projects. The canal, he thinks, would 
newly create the town (Sandwich) , hundreds of 
dwellings would be built, property increased 
in value, and good markets provided. Show- 
ing us how hard it is to predict the commercial 
conditions of a future time, he dwells on the 
"easy transportation of wood, the staple ar- 
ticle of business." Warehouses would spring 
up, and there would be growth of trade be- 
tween northern and southern states, and life 
and property would be preserved. 

The same writer describes the Neck between 
Great Pond and Long Pond in Eastham, and 
observes that "here those who think it is as 
easy to dig through the land as to mark a line 
on a map, will be disposed to cut a canal from 
ocean to the bay." It is singular that this 
plan should have been seriously considered. 
The dangers around the north end of the Cape 
would have been avoided but not the shoals, 
the hostile ships, or any great share of the 
extra distance. This project lived on, for in 



224 Cape Cod 

1817 the "Eastham and Orleans Canal Pro- 
prietors" were incorporated to open a canal 
from the head of Nauset Cove to Boat Mea- 
dow Creek. This was on the line already 
described as Jeremiah's Gutter. 

In i860, at the suggestion of the governor 
of the state, the canal project was revived, and 
the advantages were believed to be superior 
to those to be gained by tunnelling moun- 
tains. Hoosac Tunnel was then under con- 
struction and long years before it had been 
proposed to tunnel the Hoosac range for a 
canal. This was prior to the railway era in 
the Berkshires. 

The Cape Cod Canal as finally constructed 
follows the only route which, as it would seem, 
was ever open to serious consideration. While 
operated by the government during the war, 
and now under agitation for federal owner- 
ship, it was dug and is still owned by private 
capitalists. It was opened in April, 1916, to 
vessels drawing twenty-five feet of water. 
The canal is wholly at sea level, and has no 
locks. The canal proper is 7 .68 miles in length, 
but the approaches had to be dredged, so that 
it is scarcely an error to say that the canal has 
a length of thirteen miles. The bottom width 
is one hundred feet, making the waterway, 
until further widened, a one-way canal. About 



Roads and Waterways 225 

twenty or twenty-five million tons of coast- 
wise shipping have passed each year around 
the Cape. With widening to two hundred 
feet at the bottom, the ditch would, it is 
thought, accommodate about ninety per cent 
of this traffic. Such a result is hardly to be 
expected without government ownership and 
the abolition of toll charges. 

The advantages of the canal were in sub- 
stance foreseen by the fathers, who, however, 
could not look forward to the submarine 
attack which startled the Cape dwellers at 
Orleans in the summer of 19 18. This piece of 
inside route, coupled with other proposed in- 
side water lines to the southward, will give 
astonishing savings of distances between Bos- 
ton and such ports as New York, Philadelphia, 
and Baltimore. There would also be great 
saving of time, not only proportional to the 
shortening of distance but through the avoid- 
ance of delay on account of storm. Larger 
cargoes could be carried, and the charges for 
marine insurance would be diminished. 

The Cape Cod Canal alone results in saving 
from sixty-three to a hundred fifty-two miles 
for ships moving from any ports between New 
York and Providence to ports north of the 
Cape. The New York and Boston boats now 
pass through the canal, and have thus reduced 

IS 



226 Cape Cod 

their time from sixteen or eighteen hours to 
thirteen and one half hours. 

Both to those who live on the Old Colony- 
shores and to those who visit them the land 
way has become far more important than the 
water way. Where hundreds go by the sea, 
and this only in the summer, thousands go 
and come by train and motor throughout the 
year. 

Plymouth and Sandwich were both in early 
days presented before the General Court for 
not having the country road between these 
places so cleared as to be passable for man and 
beast. For long the pioneers of Sandwich 
took their grists to the mill at Plymouth on 
their backs or on those of a horse, a bull, or 
a cow. Other towns as well as the two oldest 
received imposition of fines for tolerating bad 
roads. A jury of twelve men was appointed 
in 1637 to lay out roads about Plymouth and 
Duxbury. 

Rich in his history of Truro says that going 
to Boston by land from that part of the Cape 
was less common than a voyage to China. 
All went by packet but in early days there was 
no schedule. To ride to Boston by stagecoach 
in 1790, even from the upper parts of the Cape, 
required two days. This route was used only 
when bad weather prevented going by packet. 



Roads and Waterways 227 

There were widely traveled men on the Cape 
who had never journeyed to Boston by land. 
About 1 720 a country road was laid out, forty 
feet wide, from Harwich down the Cape to 
Truro. This could not have been a good or 
permanent highway, for Freeman records an 
effort in 1796 to secure a post road to the end 
of the Cape. 

About fifteen years later President Dwight 
describes the road from Truro to Provincetown 
as heavy with sand, but good on the beach at 
low tide. Thoreau, apparently on his first 
visit in 1849, reached the terminus of the rail- 
road at Sandwich and took the stage, which 
seemed to him then almost obsolete. He was 
told that all Cape roads were heavy, and he 
nowhere denies that he found them so. He 
describes the road going down the lower part 
of the Cape as a mere cart track, deep in sand 
and so narrow that the wheels often brushed 
the shrubbery. No searching is needed to find 
scores of miles of such roads, if one even now 
departs from main lines. It is a mazy task in 
some of the forests to identify one's position 
even with the government contoured map in 
the hand. 

The Cape Cod Railroad, extending from 
Middleboro to Sandwich, was incorporated in 
1846 and opened in 1848. It joined the Fall 



228 Cape Cod 

River and Old Colony railroad, and in 1854 
was built as far as Hyannis. Extension was 
made from Yarmouth to Orleans and opened 
in 1865. Northward from Orleans the road 
was built by short stages and reached Wellfleet 
in 1869. The line was carried through to 
Provincetown in 1873. The various branches 
became the Old Colony Railroad in 1872, 
the year in which Woods Hole was joined 
to the system. The Chatham branch dates 
from 1887. 

The Boston packets ceased to run in 1871. 
In place of their rival speeding and ancient 
sociability the railway had come in, the stages 
having already ceased to drag their toilsome 
way through the sands. Provincetown was 
slow to raise itself out of the sand. Only one 
horse — having one eye — was there in 1829. 
The first plank walk was laid down on the 
long, curved street in 1838, its construction 
not being accomplished without strenuous 
opposition. 

The advent of state roads, the arteries of 
the summer Cape, is recent. A double system 
follows the north and south shores, with sev- 
eral crosslines. A trunk line from Chatham 
to Provincetown follows the direct road from 
Boston, from the junction at Orleans, to the 
lower end of the Cape. 



Roads and Waterways 229 

It will aid the eyes and understanding of 
some to follow the roadways in their relation 
to the land forms. It is a curious fact that the 
railway line from Boston southward along the 
shore stops at Plymouth. There is no public 
line of transportation leading along the first 
main track of Pilgrim travel to Bourne and 
the present village of Sagamore. The sched- 
uled transport runs the roundabout course by 
way of Middleboro, Wareham, Onset and 
Buzzards Bay. 

From Buzzards Bay to Woods Hole the rail- 
way follows the west fringe of the moraine, 
usually in view of the islands, beaches and 
spits of the Bay shore. It crosses the belt of 
hills diagonally to Falmouth village at its 
eastern base, and then runs through the south- 
ern end of the moraine to Woods Hole. 

From Buzzards Bay eastward the railway 
follows the old Monument River, now the 
canal, and from Sandwich to Yarmouth is in 
the hills of the northern edge of the moraine. 
In many places these hills, lying north of the 
railway, shut out the Bay from the traveler's 
view, but much may be seen of the salt 
marshes and bordering dune beaches. These 
obstructing hills appear, on nearing East 
Sandwich, and from West Barnstable to 
Yarmouth. 



230 Cape Cod 

The spur to Hyannis, only about four miles 
in length, crosses a low place in the moraine 
for about a mile and at Yarmouth Camp 
Ground begins abruptly to traverse the out- 
wash plain to Nantucket Sound. The main 
line after leaving Yarmouth also crosses the 
moraine to a south-central position as far as 
Harwich Station, and then turns north into 
the moraine from Harwich and Brewster to 
Orleans, and northward runs through a field of 
morainic hills and lakes about Eastham Center. 

Northward the railway crosses the Eastham 
plain to South Wellfleet, from which it rises 
upon the back of the high Wellfleet plain 
northward to North Truro. In Truro, by the 
Provincetown waterworks, the road descends 
to the beach, which it follows until it enters 
the dunes of Provincetown. 

A main line of highway joins Duxbury, 
Kingston, Plymouth and Sagamore. Two 
main lines, as above said, follow the upper 
Cape. The northshore route is much like that 
of the railway. Both run south of certain 
morainic elevations that are north of the prin- 
cipal belt of hills. These are — Town Neck in 
Sandwich, Spring Hill near East Sandwich 
and Scorton Neck. 

At Yarmouth Port this road keeps near the 
shore through the towns of Yarmouth, Den- 



Roads and Waterways 231 

nis and Brewster, and then follows nearly a 
middle course between the inner and outer 
shores to Provincetown. From Wellfleet to 
North Truro it is well hidden from both sea 
borders, winding among the hills, pine forests 
and lakes of the northern wilderness. 

The southshore route pursues its way 
around the heads of the deep bays of the out- 
wash plain through Falmouth, Cotuit and 
Marston's Mills to Hyannis, thence to Chat- 
ham nearer the shore. From Buzzards Bay 
to Woods Hole, the description of the railway 
route is equally true of the highway. 

For nearly a hundred and fifty years the 
colonists had to depend on chance travelers 
for sending letters. In days that still were 
early, a postrider took the whole mail in his 
saddlebags and they were lean at that. He 
required a week for going down the Cape and 
accomplishing his return. The first regular 
mail was established in 1754, between Plym- 
outh and Nauset. In 1775 there was a route 
from Cambridge to Plymouth, Sandwich and 
Falmouth, a round trip occupying the days 
from Monday to Saturday. The first United 
States mail was sent from Boston to Barn- 
stable in 1792. The pay of the carrier was one 
dollar per day, which was criticised as an 
extravagant use of the public money. 



232 Cape Cod 

The first post office in Yarmouth was opened 
in 1794, with mails once a week and no post 
office below it on the Cape. In 1797 there was 
a weekly mail from Yarmouth to Truro, but 
it was not thought worth while to extend the 
service to Provincetown. The period of the 
second war with Great Britain saw mails 
carried down the Cape twice a week, a third 
mail being added a few years later. In 1854 
Yarmouth had mails twice each day. 

Telegraph wires began to be strung on the 
Cape in 1855 and even rival lines were not 
long in being set up. The Cape has had its 
share in Atlantic cables and wireless flashings, 
and the aeroplane sailed over with the coming 
of the war. The isolation of the Cape has 
passed away, and the hotel keeper phones in 
his orders to Boston, and the motor truck and 
the express car are in the land. If the old 
foreland was ever asleep, which may be 
doubted, it has awakened to the modern call. 
None can predict when flight will put Truro 
and Chatham among the suburbs of Boston, 
when Old Colony trains will cease to run up- 
hill and downhill, and the Dorothy Bradford 
will find undisturbed repose. 



CHAPTER VIII 

THREE CENTURIES OF POPULATION 

The problem of population ties itself up in 
endless complications. Soil and mine, harbors 
and highways, world position, human inven- 
tion and duration of occupation are all in- 
volved. The wealth of the soil is much but 
can hardly be said to control. If one doubts 
this let him think of the United Kingdom, 
or of Belgium, or the States of Massachusetts 
and Rhode Island, none of these raising more 
than a fraction of its food. Other resources 
count, particularly if there be stores of coal 
and iron, and other materials which invite 
hand or machine craft. Situation, harbors 
and roads may be such as to favor trade. 
Thus all resources and conditions have a share 
in determining whether the people will be 
scattered and few, or compact and many. 

One might compare the United Kingdom 
and Norway — about equal in square miles — 
with forty-five million over against two mil- 
lion of human beings. Perhaps the Norwegian 

233 



234 Cape Cod 

is as enterprising as the Briton, and he has 
plenty of harbors and a fair situation. But 
there is not much underground material that 
is useful and hardly a decent county area of 
good soil in the whole kingdom. The Orient 
is different, with dense population, rich soil, 
and little manufacture save of simple home 
necessities. Natural wealth is large, but ex- 
cept as to soils, is little used, while the age of 
these countries makes western Europe look 
young. 

The development of the Old Colony is fa- 
vored or hindered by what goes on in New 
York or the Mississippi Valley. The human 
factor after all may outweigh the rest — what 
has been bred into a race, what they bring 
to their land, may be more than all that their 
environment brings to them. 

The circuit of Cape Cod Bay has its full 
share of these enigmas. Some things are plain 
enough — that the soils are poor, that the min- 
eral wealth is almost nothing, and that the 
situation, so far as the great world is con- 
cerned, is good. The harbors used to be good, 
but human invention has made over our sail- 
ing contrivances and made most of the harbors 
poor, nature helping here and there in the 
process. The prairies have drawn off the Cape 
farmer. The trout of the Great Lakes and the 



Three Centuries of Population 235 

salmon of the Columbia River have discour- 
aged the fisherman, and the population of the 
Cape has diminished. 

But the Cape keeps its long and glorious 
shoreline, its air is as pure and life giving as it 
ever was, and modern skill will make the most 
of its soils. Then the richer interior, in the 
summer furnace of a continental climate, be- 
thinks itself of the Cape and goes back to it 
for something better than wheat, or coal or 
iron, or any other form of wealth. The Cape 
has resources after all — will these riches, ap- 
pealing to the higher needs of a filling conti- 
nent, build up the old shore towns, occupy the 
foreland with intensive tillage and send its 
population curve upward in the coming dec- 
ades? Such are the questions, but they are 
not answered here. 

The population of Barnstable County had 
been going down for about twenty -five years, 
when, in 1896, the Massachusetts legislature 
provided means for a thorough study of all 
resources and conditions, in the hope of re- 
peopling this great outpost of the Common- 
wealth. The result is that a hundred pages 
are buried in a state document, which tell 
more about the real Cape than all that has 
since been written of the land and its people. 

Barnstable County went continuously up 



236 Cape Cod 

in the number of its people for nearly a cen- 
tury, from the year 1765 to i860. At the 
earlier date the county had a little more than 
twelve thousand inhabitants, and, at the open- 
ing of the Civil War, the number had risen to 
thirty-six thousand. The next fifty years saw 
an unbroken decline, but the falling off was 
less rapid than the earlier increase. 

The towns have their own interesting sto- 
ries of rising and falling. Provincetown grew 
in numbers from 1776 to 1890 and since the 
latter date has been fluctuating. The town 
has nothing of much worth in its lands but it 
does have position, some shipping, a worthy 
remnant of fishing, the summer visitors, and 
the artist colony. 

Truro grew from 1800 to 1850, and the latter 
decades of that half -century saw the popula- 
tion rising rapidly. It was the generation that 
saw the culmination of the shipping and fish- 
ing, giving life with the help of well-tilled 
farms to more than two thousand people. 
Then the decline set in, to 19 10, and another 
federal numbering will soon tell whether it has 
gone on until to-day. Marine life is almost 
completely gone, save for one freezing plant 
and a few weirs; the use of the land is far less 
than it was, and the summer industry has not 
yet made up for lost relations with the sea. 



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POPULATION OF BARNSTABLE 
COUNTY 



POPULATION OF PROVINCETOWN 
AND TRURO 



i 



Three Centuries of Population 237 

Truro goes with Eastham, Brewster and 
Mashpee in each having less than seven hun- 
dred people. Comparing in another way 
Truro stands with Chatham, Yarmouth and 
Wellfleet, for these four are the only towns 
that have suffered a continuous loss of people 
since 1865. All have had great marine pros- 
perity and have suffered from its decline. 

The town of Falmouth has been increasing 
its numbers in most of the recent decades. 
The reason is easy to find, in the villages of 
Falmouth and Woods Hole, and in the un- 
broken chain of summer places which follow 
the Falmouth shores of Vineyard Sound and 
Buzzards Bay. Most, or many, of the summer 
people do not, indeed, count in the Falmouth 
census, but they make it both possible and 
necessary that others should live there who 
are counted. 

Barnstable's decline from about 1865 wa s 
arrested about 1890, and the town has shown 
marked increases in later years, due to summer 
life in its several centers of resort. Barnstable 
is the town of two shores and fourteen post 
offices, and its bays and lakes have had mag- 
netic influences. People need not, unless they 
are surveyors, selectmen or antiquarians, pay 
much heed to town lines, and may have for- 
gotten or not have known that in this one town 



238 Cape Cod 

are Barnstable, West Barnstable, Centerville, 
Cotuit, Osterville, Marston's Mills, Craigs- 
ville and Hyannis. 

The density of population is a friendly topic 
for statisticians and geographers. The word 
has a technical flavor, but anybody, it seems, 
might have an interest in the question of how 
many people live on a square mile, and how 
many might live there. In very truth, that 
problem translated into terms of food and 
elbow room, too often creates wars and 
dictates peace, and lies at the root of our 
most irritating modern questions. 

Barnstable County has a land surface of 
four hundred and nine square miles, and her 
population for each mile in 19 10 was 67.8. 
This will mean more if we add the fact that 
Massachusetts as a whole had 418.8 people to 
the square mile. People on the average mile 
of the Bay State are six times as many as on 
an average mile of the Cape. 

The only counties that had fewer people for 
the space were Dukes (Island of Martha's 
Vineyard) with 42.1; Nantucket with 58.1; 
and Franklin with 62.6. Dukes and Nantuck- 
et, in sea and soil and in isolation, are off the 
same piece with Barnstable, while Franklin 
is a rural inland county whose largest center 
of population is Greenfield. Plymouth Coun- 



Three Centuries of Population 239 

ty had in 19 10 a density of 213.8. But this 
county has the town centers of Plymouth 
and Middleboro, and the large manufacturing 
city of Brockton. The greater part of Ply- 
mouth County, with its glacial wilderness, is 
akin to Barnstable in the wide spacing of its 
people. 

The Old Colony, or that part of it which 
lies around the Bay, is, if we except the outer 
islands, more nearly true to its ancient type 
of people than any other part of Massachu- 
setts. The three counties of Barnstable, 
Dukes and Nantucket have fewer foreign 
born, relative to their total population, than 
any other counties of the state, Barnstable 
being the lowest on the mainland. Barnstable 
had in 1900 a little more than one in ten whose 
place of birth was across the seas, and in 19 10 
the fraction rose to 13.6 in a hundred, making 
in actual numbers 3,769. 

Plymouth County had less than one-fifth 
of foreign-born residents and yet it contains 
the city of Brockton. If we consider the for- 
eign-born people outside of the big shoe town, 
they stand in much smaller proportion. Tak- 
ing Plymouth County, as a whole, although 
it runs up close to the great mixtures in and 
around Boston, it has relatively fewer foreign- 
born people than any county of the Connecti- 



240 Cape Cod 

cut Valley or the Berkshire region except the 
county of Franklin. 

Two fifths of the people of foreign birth in 
1 9 10, were Portuguese, some from Portugal 
and some from the Atlantic Islands, in all more 
than fifteen hundred. Less than a hundred 
were French Canadian, with about two hun- 
dred and fifty English and seventy-four 
Scotch. These facts show how little alien is a 
considerable section of the group that is named 
foreign. There were also about three hundred 
from Ireland, about four hundred Italians, and 
not far from two hundred and fifty Finns. 
Greece sent only two, Austria four, Hungary 
seven, and Russia thirty-two, while of Turks 
there were eight. It is plain enough that this 
corner of Massachusetts has not yet any 
baffling problems of Americanization, for there 
is no element of any numbers that is not ca- 
pable of ready assimilation. Here is one of the 
most American parts of America. 

The conditions thus recited do not, however, 
nearly represent the full influences of the Por- 
tuguese in peopling the Cape, for large numbers 
of native born had one or both parents of 
that blood. The greatest concentration of 
these swarthy people is in Provincetown, 
where dark faces are common, where Portu- 
guese names are on many signs, and where 



Three Centuries of Population 241 

half or nearly half of the population is of 
this origin. 

The representative of a New York newspa- 
per went to Provincetown not long ago, and 
declared that the old American families there 
were anxious about the coming census, fearing 
it might show that the old stock was outnum- 
bered by the Portuguese. According to this 
scribe, most of the Portuguese at this end of 
the Cape are from the Azores, and they are 
admitted to be good citizens, and to have been 
good and patriotic fighters in the late war. 

But, however much the Silvas and Dutras 
and Enoses are respected, the descendants of 
the Puritans do not want a Portuguese Board 
of Selectmen. It would break the order of the 
centuries on the Cape. The same sort of feel- 
ing moved a good lady of the town who a few 
years ago was having her daughter tutored 
in the summer vacation in order to get her 
out of a school in which she was the only 
American of the old stock. Most of the Portu- 
guese are fishermen but, as the signs show, a 
number are in the business of the town. They 
have in considerable numbers mingled in the 
population of the adjoining town of Truro. 

Many of the immigrants of the larger 
groups, English, Irish and Portuguese, have 
been attracted by fishing. In addition to this 
16 



242 Cape Cod 

motive, there were cheap homes to be had in a 
region from which the younger native popula- 
tion was moving out in search of larger oppor- 
tunities. The Portuguese have also added in a 
special way to the industrial life of the Cape 
by their skill in tilling the soil, especially in 
the raising of vegetables and fruit. 

All the towns where many Portuguese live 
have shown much progress in production from 
the fields. This is true even in Provincetown 
where soils are scanty, but here the Portu- 
guese bent is mainly for fishing. The Portu- 
guese women of Provincetown are not to be 
overlooked, for they are known as efficient in 
service, skillful with the needle, and they are 
not disposed to let the berries of the swamps 
and dunes go to waste. 

Many of these immigrants, seeking relief 
from overcrowding and feudal constraint at 
the old homes in the Azores or in other Portu- 
guese lands, have entered America through the 
port of New Bedford. If they were not caught 
by the millwork of that busy center, it was 
easy to arrive upon the cheap lands of the 
Cape. These fresh comers are known as 
thrifty, and laborious, and they make good 
citizens. 

No steam or sailing vessels have made regu- 
lar trips between New Bedford and the Azores 



Three Centuries of Population 243 

since the year 1908. Some small sailing ves- 
sels ply between the Cape Verde Islands and 
New Bedford, and bring passengers on then- 
return to this shore. The trade was discon- 
tinued during the submarine raids of the war, 
but has been resumed. The ships are small, 
and the immigrants are few in numbers at the 
present time. 

Some of the "Americanos" go back to end 
their days in the Azores, and they seem to be 
much preferred there to the "Brazileiro." A 
Lisbon paper many years ago rehearsed the 
virtues of the Portuguese who had put himself 
under American training. He was strong in 
body, good and sympathetic, ready for work 
and devoted to his family. He had brought 
culture into his home, and carried back to his 
native island the patriotic impulses and hopes 
that he had gained in the United States. 

The Brazileiro was branded as lazy, pleasure 
loving, and untrue to family and religion, as 
vain, boastful and overreaching. It is not re- 
mote to credit his Puritan neighbors and the 
pressure of the New England environment, 
with the virtues of the Americanos, making 
due allowance for the exuberance of the Latin 
journalist. 

The recent immigration, mainly of the last 
twenty years, has concentrated more espe- 



244 Cape Cod 

cially in the town of Falmouth . There are two 
classes of these people. The Bravas, or black 
Portuguese, come from the Atlantic Islands 
and are said to be a cross of African negroes 
and Portuguese exiles. The white Portuguese 
hold themselves quite above the blacks, and 
have no intercourse with them unless it be of 
employers with the employed. These newer 
immigrants have not yet come into American 
notions of womankind, and the consequence 
is that the wives and children, even young 
children, do long days of work in the fields. 
These people have brought from the religious 
connection of the old country little loyalty, but 
some measure of superstition. 

The new Portuguese have not only gone to 
Falmouth, but especially to the eastern parts 
of the town, the whites being at East Falmouth 
and the blacks at Waquoit. One of the good 
ministers of Falmouth has in recent years giv- 
en himself with true zeal and self-sacrifice to 
the modernizing and Americanizing of these 
people, employing night schools and other 
means of enlightenment. In the district school 
at East Falmouth in the winter of 1918-1919, 
there were a hundred and eleven children of 
whom nine were American. All the rest were 
the offspring of foreign-born Portuguese 
parents. 



Three Centuries of Population 245 

Some nine hundred make up the Portuguese 
count in these eastern parts of Falmouth. A 
few have made much progress and have be- 
come excellent citizens. Some Portuguese are 
credited with an intent to control town affairs 
within a period of seven years. They are 
mostly on the soil, but a few are carpenters 
and painters. In 191 8 it was a Portuguese 
girl who took first honors in the Falmouth 
High School. 

The new farmers are working northward in 
the forests lying toward Hatchville in Fal- 
mouth. Some of the homes are very decent 
bungalows, especially to be found on the road 
north from Teaticket . There is one settlement 
of nine houses, of which eight are Portuguese, 
and only one, the worst of all, the property of 
a native. The Portuguese are rapidly acquir- 
ing motor cars, which, with fair roads on the 
outwash plain, opening to the trunk highway 
of the south shore, are useful for marketing. 
There is a considerable group of Portuguese in 
the town of Barnstable. A dozen houses will 
be found in the scrub, not far from Hyannis, 
on the road leading to Yarmouth Port. 

Some Portuguese have drifted eastward into 
Harwich and Chatham, thus giving the Cape 
an invasion at both ends ; an earlier incursion 
from the north and a later one from the south- 



246 Cape Cod 

west. The Portuguese women of Harwich 
make a season's round which not only fills 
their pockets but flings an interesting sidelight 
on modern Cape activities. They begin in the 
spring with picking the May flower, the arbu- 
tus, with which this sandy corner of Massa- 
chusetts is blessed. This they peddle, to a 
reward of forty dollars apiece it may be. Then 
our hardworking and thrifty woman goes to 
Falmouth and nets a hundred dollars in the 
strawberry harvest. She returns home for the 
blueberry season, and when these are done the 
cranberry gathering is on and autumn has 
come. 

Some of the men get jobs at the aviation 
camp in Chatham, others work on the railroad, 
and the middle autumn requires considerable 
work on the bogs, after the berries are har- 
vested. The labor problem does not much dis- 
tress the Portugee — he raises his own working 
force, feeds, clothes and does not fail to em- 
ploy them. A boy of this race went astray and 
was haled to Barnstable Court. The judge 
asked if his father was present. He arose 
among a crowd of his countrymen, and to the 
question: — how many children have you — said, 
twenty-three. I did not ask your age, rejoined 
the magistrate — how many children have you? 
Twenty-three, was again replied, and none 



Three Centuries of Population 247 

went wrong but this one. Take the lad, said 
the judge — and see if you can make a good boy 
of him. So it appears that the Cape will have 
people, but they will not all be Mayflower 
descendants. 

Italians have not made much way on the 
Cape, but form a small colony in Sandwich, 
where they live in the old houses around the 
abandoned glass works. They work chiefly in 
the Keith Car Works at Sagamore and go 
thither by bicycles, jitneys and the trains. 
The Finn Colony is in the western environs of 
Barnstable village, where these people raise 
farm and garden crops, dig clams, and now, 
like the Italians, seek the more ample returns 
of shop work in Sagamore. The Finns con- 
tinued to come until the opening of the war. 

The foreigner has not made much impres- 
sion on the life around Cape Cod Bay. If 
there be exceptions they are found in the shop 
neighborhoods of Plymouth and Sagamore, on 
the farms of Falmouth and in the fishing indus- 
tries of the lower Cape. The newcomers have 
not made enough progress to take any appre- 
ciable part in the government of the towns. 
Falmouth, for example, has its thousand 
Portuguese, more or less, but the roll of its 
town officers points to an astonishing main- 
tenance of the ancient traditions. 



248 



Cape Cod 



The list of officers and committeemen in 
Falmouth for a recent year contains about a 
hundred and thirty names. The designations 
of the various committees are of the pure flavor 
of old New England. We find a herring com- 
mittee, surveyors of wood, fence viewers, field 
drivers, surveyors of lumber, public weighers 
and a committee for the care of public wells. 
One from west of the Berkshires has to have 
some of these enigmas solved for him, but he 
can well imagine all sorts of arbitrations and 
adjudications of neighborly or unneighborly 
differences of opinion. 

This list of a hundred and thirty names in 
Falmouth does not include a single name that 
strikes one as foreign, and they are nearly all 
of British origin. Only one or two have dis- 
tinctly Biblical names. This would be differ- 
ent if we were to follow the records back. 
Even in 1872 the list has a Meltiah, a Job, a 
Zaccheus, an Ezekiel, a Jabez and a Joshua. 

The legislation of the town meetings shows 
a survival of old ways and thoughts in the 
official life. Among the ' 'articles' ' in the report 
of the town meeting of 191 7 is this — "To see 
if the town will vote to restrain horses, neat 
cattle and swine from running at large within 
the limits of the town the year ensuing; voted 
that they be so restrained." "To see if the 



Three Centuries of Population 249 

town will vote to sell the herrings from one 
or more of its rivers," etc. Then follow the 
various regulations of the herring catch that 
were voted. 

If there can be such a thing as a cheerful bur- 
ial place it is the modern cemetery of Falmouth 
village. Seen in an August Sunday morning, 
it joined in perfect blending the loveliness of 
nature with simple art and gentle memory. 
It is a natural forest, oaks and a few pines, 
open to the sun which floods the silky green of 
the turf, the brilliancy gently toned by the 
shadows of the trees. The lots are in low 
terraces, and the monuments and headstones 
are modest and simple. 

The names on these stones taken at random 
are a perfect record of Americanism, or if you 
please, of the Anglo-Saxon blood. Here are 
the names — Swift, Bourne, Baker, Pierce, 
Clark, Lawrence, Walker, Davis, Thayer, 
Phinney, Williams, Spencer, Turner, Waters, 
GifTord, Jenkins, Hatch, Nye, Fish, Crosby, 
Robinson, Wright, Hamblin, Sanford. These 
names in their silence are vocal of old Falmouth 
and the old Cape, and they show too, modern 
as this God's acre is, how the old life is pre- 
served in the new, as the third century comes 
to its end. 

In the thin volume which records the doings 



250 Cape Cod 

at the two hundredth anniversary of Falmouth 
are given fourteen names of those who landed 
here in 1660, which were still here at the time 
of the bicentennial. Of the fourteen, five are 
living names in Falmouth to-day. The five 
names are Jenkins, Hinckley, Hatch, Robin- 
son and Hamblin. For a century and a half 
nearly every Falmouth family was represented 
on the ocean. To-day the roll call would reach 
far over the continent but the heart of the 
older life still remains in the town which gave 
it birth. 

Masjipee in all its history probably never 
had as many as four hundred inhabitants and 
has always had a smaller count than any other 
town of the Cape. Someone has volunteered 
the wise opinion that the town did not develop 
because of its remote situation. It is hardly 
to be called far away, however, for it has its 
bit of the Vineyard Sound bays and shores, 
and is crossed by the main road from Falmouth 
to Chatham. It has its share of soil and more 
than its part of beautiful lakes and running 
waters. 

The limitations of Mashpee have always 
been in its people. Here the remnants of a 
once widespread Indian population were gath- 
ered. Here good men sought to convert, edu- 
cate, and uplift them, and bad men crowded 



Three Centuries of Population 25 l 

them off their lands, and took advantage of 
them. It is the old story of the ultimate sub- 
mergence of every lingering bit of the red race. 

Richard Bourne and his noble successors, 
who devoted lifetimes to the salvation of their 
little flock around Mashpee Lake, and counted 
with joy the number of praying Indians, might 
have a shiver of disappointment, could they 
see the woods and streams and scattered homes 
and people of Mashpee to-day. We are told 
that peacefulness reigns there, where no pure- 
blooded Indian has lived in many long years. 
The infiltration of negro and Portuguese dark 
blood, has produced what to the casual comer 
would not seem to be other than a real com- 
munity of Africans. No doubt the truth as to 
Mashpee culture is somewhere in the mean, 
for the Mashpee combination is not exactly a 
theme for lyrical fervor, and yet it is on the 
whole a respectable community of dark- 
skinned farmers and laborers who return at 
night to rather primitive houses, and do the 
best that less than three hundred limited peo- 
ple can do, to keep moving the machinery of a 
New England town. 

Two hundred years ago Harvard College 
was made the trustee of a fund from an Eng- 
lish benefactor, and to this day the college 
annually pays over the income of the endow- 



252 Cape Cod 

merit for the support of the Mashpee Church. 
Other influences from the great institution at 
Cambridge are near enough in the summer 
months to shed their light upon this dark peo- 
ple, in whose domain the summer sun is as 
glorious as anywhere on the Cape, and the 
winter cold is often as pronounced and invigo- 
rating as in the Berkshires or the Green 
Mountains. 

The population of the Cape has sent out its 
full share of distinguished sons into the world. 
Nathaniel Gorham, President of the Conti- 
nental Congress and signer of the federal Con- 
stitution, was descended from Captain John 
Gorham of Barnstable. The Otis family hav- 
ing first settled in Hingham, John Otis, Senior, 
and John Otis, Junior, removed to Barnstable 
and built near the Great Marshes the home- 
stead where several generations of Otises made 
their home. A number of men of this line 
gained distinction in Massachusetts and in the 
nation. James Otis, "pioneer of the American 
Revolution," was born in the Barnstable farm- 
house in 1725. Harrison Gray Otis, whose life 
has recently been written by one of his de- 
scendants, Dr. Samuel E. Morrison of Harvard 
University, was born in Boston in 1765, but he, 
with some members of the family, took refuge 
in the old Cape homestead in the troublous 



Three Centuries of Population 253 

times that beset Massachusetts in the opening 
months of the Revolution. 

Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw, and Professor 
John G. Palfrey, the orator at the Barnstable 
celebration in 1839, were both of Barnstable 
lineage. William Everett, the distinguished 
headmaster of the Quincy school was a great- 
grandson of Nathaniel Gorham. Among well- 
known living persons are the Swifts of the 
great Chicago packing houses, whose forbears 
were residents of Cape Cod. The President of 
Brown University, Dr. William H. P. Faunce, 
is descended from Elder Thomas Faunce, 
whose ashes repose on Burial Hill in Plymouth. 
It was he who by a long life of high service, 
joined, in his tenacious memory and facile 
speech, the early history of the Pilgrim fathers 
to more recent days. The first American 
Faunce came in the Ann in 1623, and Elder 
Faunce was, just before his death, the only 
remaining person who had talked with the 
sons of the Mayflower people. Major General 
Leonard Wood is also of Cape Cod origin. 

Scores of small cities there are in our 
crowded East, any one of which has as many 
men, women and children as have ever lived 
at any one time in Barnstable County or in the 
Town of Plymouth. It is idle to inquire 
whether the Bay shores will ever have a larger 



254 Cape Cod 

population than they have had in the past. 
The value of populations is not in their num- 
bers but in their quality. It is not even so 
much in what they have done — the quantity 
of fish they have caught, the corn and cran- 
berries they have raised, or the products of 
their few and scattered mills — it is what they 
have been and what they have thought, that 
have given them their place in the history 
and the affection of Americans. Such are the 
influences which have made the face of this 
half -barren foreland of more meaning than the 
fertile bottoms of great valleys or the fat soils 
of the wide prairie. 



CHAPTER IX 

THE ENVIRONMENT OF THE SEA 

That distinguished New England preacher, 
Horace Bushnell, once made a sermon, or 
wrote an essay, on the moral uses of the sea. 
The wisdom of men, he thought, would not 
have covered three fourths of the sphere with 
water, but would have made leviathan give 
way to the reapers, on a good round ball of 
meadow and ploughland. But, saying nothing 
of moderated climate and needed rain, he 
thought there were larger and wider needs for 
the sea. Brotherhood and enlightenment may 
grow out of trade, and exchange of ideas and 
goods is easy between Boston and Singapore, 
but difficult between Timbuctoo and Samark- 
and. 

Moreover, the medieval shackles of the old 
world would gradually have lapped over into 
the new, if there had been no Atlantic Ocean, 
and there would have been no reserved conti- 
nent on which man could try a fresh experi- 
ment in institutions. One looks for stagnation 

255 



256 Cape Cod 

in the heart of the Alps or in the Kentucky 
mountains, but "the shores and islands of the 
world have felt the pulse of human society 
and yielded themselves to progress." 

No easy problems are these, and there is no 
thought of dragging the Old Colony deep into 
earth philosophy. Most of the Pilgrims had 
been farmers and artisans and many of them 
found themselves, or at least their grandchil- 
dren and great-grandchildren, digging clams, 
catching and drying fish and sailing vessels. 

How deep the change went, or whether it 
struck really below the surface of their lives, 
may be a question. It is safe enough, we may 
be pretty sure, to bury the notion that the 
shores and storms and hills and boulders of 
New England made them into another kind 
of people from the company that sailed out of 
Delft Haven. Probably the Pilgrims changed 
New England more than New England 
changed the Pilgrims. The Mayflower Eng- 
lishman was old in his heredity of character 
when he came to Plymouth Rock, and he has 
not changed so much in his three hundred 
years on this side of the Atlantic. The setting 
of his day's work and of his season's toil, is 
quite different from Scrooby and Austerfield, 
and he has shifted from the occupations of his 
fathers, throwing off meanwhile some of the 



The Environment of the Sea 257 

austerities of Puritanism, as have his May- 
flower cousins in New York and Ohio. 

All this is not to toss overboard our faith in 
what environment does to us, it is only an- 
nouncing at the outset that surroundings are 
not everything, and whatever their deepest in- 
fluences may be, they require a long time to 
exert them. The first of the Old Colony folk 
had been subject to other sorts of environment 
for millenniums, but what had happened to 
them thereby we cannot trace. We know what 
they were in 1620, and what kind of a land 
they came to. That new land made over their 
outer ways and in some fashion no doubt bore 
in on their thought and inner life. 

We may remember that the motherland of 
the Pilgrims is little in square mlies, but big in 
coastline, that Britain has a place in the world 
out of all ratio to her size. If we remember that 
nobody in Great Britain lives more than two 
or three hours from the sea, perhaps we shall 
know why the Old Colony is so small and yet 
so large in America. When Tennyson wrote, 

Broad based on her people's will 
And compassed by the inviolate sea, 

he brought a fact and not an argument. But 
it would be easy to make the argument, and 
to read the logic between the lines. 
17 



258 Cape Cod 

The compact drawn in Provincetown Har- 
bor sounds like the work of democrats and 
freemen. If the men were such, and if their 
environment had somewhat tended to make 
them such, it was the insular environment of 
centuries that had been doing it. The east 
winds and the toil on Plymouth shore did not 
beat it into them in a day. 

We have no idea of setting up a title to this 
last chapter on the Old Colony, and running 
away from it, as if the neighborhood of the sea 
had meant nothing from 1620 to 1920. It has 
meant much, and if we would comprehend how 
much, we might ask what the Pilgrims might 
have become or have failed to become, if they 
had not stopped on the shores. Suppose they 
had gone far inland. We might possibly read 
their history in the story of equally free and 
strong men who moved along the Great Valley 
of the South, and spread out into the secluded 
uplands of the Appalachians to fossilize for 
generations. 

The Pilgrims did not settle on an island, but 
it might almost as well have been. On the 
Cape they could go but a few miles from the 
sea — rarely did they plant their houses a mile 
from the strand. In Plymouth and Kingston 
and Duxbury they lived upon the shore and 
back of them was a wilderness which only 



The Environment of the Sea 259 

stern necessity made them enter. Their lives 
fronted the main. 

They found the soils none too extended or 
good, and the factory era in New England was 
scores of years in the unseen and undreamed 
future. They were forced upon the sea. Per- 
haps there was more democracy in this, and 
certainly there was outlook on the world of 
the seventeenth century, a world whose mag- 
nitude had then but dawned on the race. 
They were a part of the outgoing into that 
world from that most effective of colonizing 
nations, whose sons to-day make nothing of 
ploughing or fighting at the antipodes. 

One of the keenest English students of earth 
science thinks fishing is a training in democ- 
racy, "based on the equality of man and man 
in the jointly-owned boat, and the equality of 
man and woman in the common home from 
which the fisherman is absent so often and so 
long that dual control must be evolved." 1 
Lyde thinks constitutional government has 
everywhere grown out of the domestic organi- 
zation of a fishing race, whose members are 
brave and enduring, lovers of freedom and 
space, individualistic and conservative. Else- 
where this writer characterizes the sea as the 
great nursery of democracy. 

x Lionel W. Lyde, The Continent of Europe, p. 12. 



260 Cape Cod 

If half of this could be proven true, the Pil- 
grims, responding to the inviting waters that 
washed their shores, came under an influence 
that strengthened the independence and 
rooted the principles which they brought 
across the sea with them. Moreover, a writer 
who knew New England as well as Lyde knows 
old England, comments on the degeneracy or 
half -savagery that is likely to go with the fur 
trade, while fishing "made the hardy fisherman 
and bold sailor of the New England coast. 
The fur trader debauched the Indians, profit- 
ing by a toil not his own. The fisherman, 
industrious and capable, more or less interested 
in his ventures, controlled the seas from the 
foothold in his boat, and mastered individual 
freedom on the land." 

The Pilgrims might elsewhere have found a 
lean and sandy soil, but there was another in- 
fluence, or condition, of greater power — the Old 
Colony climate — and that was mainly ordered 
by the sea. While there is some sign that they 
felt its greater rigor as compared with England, 
nevertheless they thought it remarkably simi- 
lar in its temperatures to the land from which 
they had come. 

In Good News from New England, included 
in Winslow's Relation, the writer gives an ac- 
count of the climate which we would not cut 



The Environment of the Sea 261 

short. "Then for the temperature of the air, 
in almost three years experience I can scarce 
distinguish New England from old England, 
in respect of heat and cold, frost, snow, winds, 
etc. Some object, because our plantation 
lieth in the latitude of 42 , it must needs be 
much hotter. I confess I cannot give the rea- 
son of the contrary; only experience teacheth 
us, that if it do exceed England, it is so little 
as must require better judgments to discern it. 
And for the winter, I rather think (if there be 
difference) it is both sharper and longer in New 
England than Old; and yet the want of those 
comforts in the one which I have enjoyed in 
the other, may deceive my judgment also. 
But in my best observations, comparing our 
own condition with the Relations of other 
parts of America, I cannot conceive of any to 
agree better with the constitution of the Eng- 
lish, not being oppressed with extremity of 
heat, nor nipped by biting cold; by which 
means, blessed by God, we enjoy our health 
notwithstanding those difficulties we have 
undergone." 

There is much to admire in this story — it 
has in quaint phrase a scientific temper quite 
worthy of the present age. There is no at- 
tempt to explain what was to the writer inex- 
plicable, not knowing the influence of the 



262 Cape Cod 

Atlantic drift and the westerly winds on the 
more northerly parts of Europe. Then too 
the oceanic character of the climate is brought 
out, that is, its evenness and mild tempera- 
tures, though the cause is not recognized; and 
finally there is full allowance made for the 
possible bias of personal impressions. 

The winter of the settlement is thought to 
have been mild, with little snow, otherwise the 
little community might not have buried their 
dead as they did on Cole's Hill, or have carried 
on so effectively the building of their cabins. 
Great storms would come, though not perhaps 
in their lifetime, a winter uproar, as in 1815, 
around the Buzzards Bay shores, when salt 
houses were destroyed, trees killed by salt 
overflow into fresh swamps, springs and wells 
made salt where not directly reached by the 
flood, and the tide eight feet above the com- 
mon levels ; or like the storm a century earlier 
when the Indians dug a tunnel through the 
snow in Eastham that they might carry the 
body of their beloved pastor, the Reverend 
Samuel Treat, to its rest. 

But commonly nature does not put on her 
sternest moods on the Cape, save at the sea 
border, where every winter's winds and waves 
lash the shore — and raw and biting blasts la- 
den with sand sweep across the open fields, and 



The Environment of the Sea 263 

from earliest times have taught the Cape dwel- 
ler to build his house low, planted in a hollow 
or behind a forest, with his apple trees and 
gardens. 

The climate is oceanic, and much is com- 
pressed into that rather scientific word — re- 
freshing summers, and moderate cold in win- 
ter. The Wellfleet oysterman, truly , no doubt, 
told Thoreau that no ice ever formed on the 
back of the Cape, or not more than once in a 
century, and but little snow lay there. 

The greatest thickness of ice on the ponds 
back of Provincetown is about nine inches, and 
in some winters there is no ice harvest at all. 
There were eight inches on a small pond below 
Mashpee Lake in the winter just passed, but 
in the previous winter, which was cold every- 
where in our northern states, the Cape was not 
overlooked, for there were twenty-four inches 
of ice on Mashpee Lake, and automobiles 
freely roamed upon its surface. 

Nor must it be supposed that summer heat 
never oppresses. Even Provincetown, if it 
must be said, is sometimes hot, behind its ram- 
part of dunes. The historian, Dr. Freeman, 
says of the favored position of some old salt 
vats, "the sand hills under which they stood 
reflected on the vats a strong heat." In a 
land which men love, the climate is almost 



264 Cape Cod 

always called "favorable to longevity," and 
Freeman bears it out, to a degree at least, by 
asserting, for about the year 1800, that Chat- 
ham, with 1 35 1 inhabitants, was so healthful 
as not to justify the settlement there of a phy- 
sician. This devoted son of the Cape sums up 
his loyal admiration thus — ' ' The Cape is and 
was so intended by the Allwise to be a good 
land, surrounded by goodly seas, blessed with 
an invigorating and inspiring atmosphere, sup- 
plying all needful comforts to its possessors." 
Standing up seven or eight feet above the 
ground of a small triangular park in Falmouth 
village is a glacial boulder. It is surmounted 
by an anchor lying about eight feet along the 
top of the rock. On the face of the stone is a 
bronze tablet, showing in low relief a sailing 
ship. On the border is a knotted rope, with a 
starfish at each corner, and under the ship is 
this inscription — 

Dedicated by the citizens 

and 

Public school children of Falmouth 

In loving memory of her 

Seamen 

1907. 

Here is the homage of a new century to daring 
ancestors and a romantic past. Yesterday the 
Cape belonged to the sea — does it belong to- 



The Environment of the Sea 265 

day to the land? Has the Cape Codder, ceas- 
ing his far wanderings, set his face to the land? 
Having shaped the life of the Pilgrim and 
turned him into a fisherman, a whaler, or a 
master of world trade, has the sea lost its grip 
on the present sons of the Cape and left them 
land grubbers, devoid of distances? 

Hardly is the land thus degenerate. If one 
looks up, and one cannot help looking up, 
the same water is there, yet never the same, 
coming from somewhere, moving some whith- 
er; the same colors, but never the same — 
blues, greens, purples, grays and what not, 
putting to shame anybody who cannot ana- 
lyze a rainbow. The horizon is shut away 
in mist, or it rims the view as sharp and far 
away as it was in any clear day in the year 
1620. 

Here is the same beach, yet remodeled by 
every tide and revolutionized by every storm. 
You see the same cliffs, yet moved a little in- 
land, scarred and gullied in a slightly different 
pattern, undermined and collapsing now here, 
now there . Something of the moving picture 
is this Cape — beacon fires, refuge huts, and 
meeting-house steering have passed away, but 
lighthouses, the life savers' well-built houses, 
and Scargo Hill and Manomet arouse the same 
thoughts of the sea and its toilers, of the ships 



266 Cape Cod 

and their dangers, of the waves and their 
escaping prey. 

Not many structures are so alluring as a 
wharf. The laden fishing boat in Bergen, 
Great Grimsby, Plymouth or Provincetown, 
will call a crowd, and a good haul from the lob- 
ster traps awakens other than housewives and 
hotel chefs. It is the sea and a harvest gotten 
out of it that appeals — the benevolence and 
happy chance of it, as well as the toil and dar- 
ing of it. Of course the devotee of brook trout 
and deer and forest trails will have his ardent 
say, and the sea lover is too sure of his shore 
and his ocean to care. 

Common things get a new glory when they 
are mixed with the sea. The boat heading 
for New York, whether seen as of yore in the 
twilight outside the Cape, with all lights on, 
or more dimly from the Plymouth shore out 
in the Bay, aiming at the Canal, has more 
fascination than the equally brilliant, swifter 
moving New York train. The coal barges 
make one think of Pennsylvania mines, of the 
wharves of Philadelphia and Newport News, 
of the cotton mills of Salem, the shoes of 
Brockton and Lynn and the shops of Boston, 
but it is more than an everyday bit of trade 
and stern toil, it is the world's interchange, 
the cosmic highway and the life of man. 



The Environment of the Sea 267 

This is the fascination of Mr. Lincoln's 
homely heroes of Cape Cod. Rough they may 
look, plainly and profanely they may speak, 
but they are no longer common persons, they 
impersonate struggle, daring and achieve- 
ment, they have gone down to the sea in ships, 
they have done business in great waters, they 
see far beyond the doors and dooryards of 
their low shingled cottages and you see with 
them. The toothless grandson of Johnny 
Trout, spending the peaceful holiday of his 
old age, sparkles with the vitality of the ocean 
and pours out upon you the remembered lore 
of Batavia and Melbourne. So it must ever 
be on the Cape, for here the voyagers of the 
sea have come to land and here the toilers of 
the land come down to the shore to breathe, 
and to look out widely. 

The dweller on Old Colony shores can hard- 
ly have escaped being a lover of the sea. It 
is born with him, lives with him, and is handed 
on to his children. What this does for him can 
not so well be defined as dreamed of, for so it 
is with all love. We are quite aware that no 
less a person than Henry Van Dyke tosses all 
this aside. "The sea is too big for loving and 
too uncertain." Indeed some ambitious per- 
sons have loved the sea, deluded people who 
have not discovered that it is a formless and 



268 Cape Cod 

disquieting passion — to devote one's self to a 
"salt abstraction." It is like loving a nation's 
type of woman, Van Dyke thinks — better one 
of them. Hence, we suppose, one might turn 
to little rivers. But little rivers may dry away, 
or plunge underground . Rivers are temporary 
things in a continent's unfolding, often made 
up of scraps, pirated by other rivers, mutilated 
by engineers, fouled with man's refuse, perse- 
cuting one with mosquitoes, tearing the flesh 
with briers, and bruising the feet with stones. 
One might say that God too is great, and 
inscrutable, for one would not like to call Him 
uncertain. Would the distinguished clergy- 
man think God too great to be loved? The 
soul if capacious enough may love what is 
great. And it hinges on what one means by 
loving. The Pilgrim lived, and his offspring 
live, by the sea. If they love it, does it mean 
to be drawn toward it, inspired by it, to be 
awed by its mystery, thrilled by its vastness, 
to have imagination roused by its depths, its 
spaces, its plenitude of life, mother of all life? 
Does it signify reveling in its infinitude of 
changing colors, to join with every breaking 
roller on its shore in our short sojourn by it — 
the waves that have not rested in eons, yet 
tidal to the predictable moment of rise and 
fall and least of all "uncertain " ? 



The Environment of the Sea 269 

We watch it destroying lands, rebuilding 
continents, engulfing the works of man, and 
man himself— terrible, is it, rather than allur- 
ing — well, on the whole reckoning, the ocean, 
remorseless as it seems to be, has been friendly 
to humankind. It depends on the size of your 
loving, whether you want the distant view, 
and not a foreground, a trout instead of a cod, 
a swordfish rather than a leviathan. 

So leaving all to love their river, their moun- 
tain, their lake, their forest, or their ocean, as 
they will, the Cape man seems to line up with 
that elder New England prophet, who, broad 
beyond his time, wrote, "It is of the greatest 
consequence, too, that such a being as God 
should have images prepared to express him, 
and set him before the mind of man .... 
These he has provided in the heavens and the 
sea, which are the two great images of his vast- 
ness and his power." 

Dark-heaving, boundless, endless, and sublime. 
I gaze — and am changed at the sight. 

It is easy enough to say that if one brings 
his idealism with him he will be inspired by 
the sea. But the sea like other things might 
be staled by custom to him that lives by it. 
A man might, as some are said to do, get all 
his firewood from the beach, and never wonder 



270 Cape Cod 

where the battered log grew, who sawed and 
spiked the plank, what ship lost the new lum- 
ber in the rolling of the storm, or who uncorked 
the empty bottle. 

When wrecks off the shore were more fre- 
quent than they are now, moon cursing — 
(Cape Cod — moon cussing) was more common 
than it is to-day. Yet to-day, if you drag up 
a plank beyond the grasp of the wave and put 
your name on it, he is no proper son of the 
Cape who would not respect your ownership, 
and leave the piece until you found it conven- 
ient to bear it up the cliff. The "mooning" 
follows the traditions of that old-world and 
old-time period of piratical crews who used 
to decoy vessels on the rocks by false lights 
and cursed the moon when she disturbed 
their diabolical work. Laws and humanity 
have eliminated the savagery, for the Cape 
man would rescue rather than ruin, and if the 
wreckage be above a certain value he must 
advertise and seek the owner, before he can 
claim it as his own. 

Wreckage is not so common as it used to be, 
in these days of steamships, yet a man, 
hardly now in middle life, recalls salvaging fif- 
teen thousand feet of lumber which he hauled 
up the outer cliff with ropes and tackle. A 
couple of hundred feet of heavy hawser was 



The Environment of the Sea 271 

another ocean gift of no mean value, and our 
friend's father recovered a valuable tiger skin, 
racing to it with a Provincetown deacon, who, 
tradition allows, was very angry. Brussels 
carpets and cases of champagne have been 
drawn sometimes from this titanic grab bag. 
Was Cape Cod a bad place for morals, we ven- 
tured to inquire, "No, but when they go moon 
cussing look out ! ! " All of which seems to mean 
that here human nature varies in its expression 
by force of circumstances, but its substance 
is as everywhere. Some think Cape people are 
especially "thrifty." So to judge is not to 
display a wide acquaintance with villagers and 
countrymen, live they where they may. 

The seaward compulsion of the Cape did not 
escape the acute mind of Timothy Dwight, 
who did not fail to see why the houses were 
built in valleys and defended by forests. The 
children of Provincetown played as familiarly 
in the water as other children frolic in the 
streets, and little boys managed boats with 
skill. Every employment seemed connected 
with the sea. And the moral influence of it 
was peculiarly in Dwight's province. There 
was the broadening influence of the sea, of 
sailing the ships and receiving strangers, for 
"while most of their countrymen have been 
chained to a small spot of earth, they have 



2T2 Cape Cod 

traversed the ocean." Perhaps he would have 
agreed with a later writer that distances en- 
franchise, while altitudes enslave. 

How many would live on the Cape or go to 
the Cape, if it were so much land and just 
such land, in an interior situation? A little 
farming, a little fresh-water fishing, a little 
hunting, no water power, no mineral wealth, 
forests for beauty but not for the lumberman — 
nothing — until we get the view of that visitor 
who counted the real area as triple the actual 
surface, reckoning in the adjoining sea, for its 
manifold production as compared with the 
fields, and, quoting Fisher Ames, "every cod- 
fish drawn up has a pistareen in its mouth." 

How much is there on the Cape that is not 
for the sea, or of the sea, or does not suggest 
the sea — the monument of Provincetown, me- 
morial of a sea voyage — the lighthouses, the 
life-saving stations, the wireless towers, the 
old windmills built because there was little 
fuel, no water power, and there were winds of 
the sea — wharves, villages, low houses, kettle- 
hole gardens, drooping goldenrod, shrinking 
apple trees, pitch pine carpets on the sand — 
man and nature all attuned to the majestic 
overlordship of the sea. 

Somewhat has been written of the supposed 
naive ways of the Cape people. Something 



The Environment of the Sea 273 

like this has perhaps come to be expected by- 
readers who never went nearer the Cape than 
Scituate or Providence or, perhaps, were never 
east of the Berkshires. This misconception 
has grown by what it has fed on for three 
fourths of a century. Some, at least, of dis- 
cerning people who have gone up and down 
the length of Barnstable County for years 
have never observed that a trainload of Cape 
natives chatters more vociferously than other 
trainloads, and have never seen half the train 
"leaning out of the windows" conversing in 
shouts with the villagers. 

The Brewsters along the railway are not 
bewilderingly numerous, and no one should 
count on seeing all Provincetown out to meet 
the train. These good people do not jostle for 
the papers as hungry chickens reach for food, 
nor keep you off the sidewalk, nor behave 
otherwise than as the average Pilgrim descend- 
ant, or cultivated New Englander, or Ameri- 
canized Portuguese should treat his casual 
neighbor. 

If Shaler wrote truly of that "deep and pe- 
culiar enlargement" that comes to dwellers by 
the sea; if Lucy Larcom knew in very truth 
that one reared by the sea requires a wide hori- 
zon for the body and the mind, shall we find 
the Cape supporting these well-settled notions 
18 



274 Cape Cod 

of the scholar and the story writer? Thoreau, 
it may be quite safe to think, did not conclude 
that all the people of the Cape, of Falmouth, 
Barnstable, Chatham, Orleans and the rest, 
were as ignorant and provincial as some of the 
queer characters which he liked to encounter, 
and did rind, in his out-of-the-way itinerary, 
nor would he, we fancy, subscribe to the con- 
ventional admiration of his odd genius, which 
assumes that he said the last word about the 
dwellers on this foreland. 

Barnstable County folks probably do not 
need a defender, nor do they perhaps care so 
much what is written about them. They will 
proceed with intensive farming, will catch fish, 
manage hotels, live at leisure on their income, 
send their children to normal schools and col- 
leges, and do their share of work and thinking 
in that fine old New England of which they 
are a part. 

Suppose a Cape Codder did visit New York 
City, and did therefore "have something to 
talk about to his neighbors all winter." And 
suppose he was devoid of ambition and went to 
his burrow every autumn with a half-barrel 
of pork, five hundred pounds of salt fish, some 
potatoes and a few cords of wood ; or suppose 
he is "different" being slow to change; grant 
all these things — could not one find these 



The Environment of the Sea 275 

types in Maine, or Vermont or the Empire 
State? Why must we feel compelled to dis- 
cover on these fascinating shores a people who 
never existed, whose quaintness could be 
matched on any other shore and outdone in 
the recesses of any mountain region. 

It is not easy to wean the Old Colony man 
from his native shores. He may go where he 
will at the call of duty or opportunity, but the 
pictures of memory stay with him and he 
often hears the call to return. And he comes 
back to rest, to meet the old neighbors, to 
rebuild the paternal cottage, to refurbish the 
mansion of his sea-going ancestor, to amuse 
himself with the cranberry bog, to experiment 
in modern farming, to roll over the roads that 
in his boyhood were down in the sand. Per- 
haps the call is stronger, and he returns to 
finish his days. It is not the old friends, for 
many of them are gone — it is not the lakes or 
forests, for others are as beautiful — it must be 
the lure of the ocean, the sea blood has never 
gotten out of his veins. 

Let not a belated lover of the Cape, but 
another, better fitted, say it, "A Cape man 
finds nowhere else so glorious a home, so full 
of such sweet memories. The Cape colors him 
all his life — the roots and fiber of him. He 
may get beyond, but he never gets over the 



276 Cape Cod 

Cape. . . . He will feel in odd hours, to his 
life's end, the creek tide on which he floated 
inshore as a boy, the hunger of the salt marsh 
in haying time, the cold splash of the sea spray 
at the harbor's mouth, the spring of the boat 
over the bar, the wind rising inshore, the blast 
of the wet northeaster. He will remember the 
yellow dawn of an October morning across his 
misty moors, and the fog of the chill pond 
among the pine trees, and above all the blue 
sea within its headlands, on which go the 
white- winged ships to that great, far-off world 
which the boy had heard of and the grown 
man knows so well." 

We have heard a historian question whether 
the Plymouth Pilgrims were a great and forma- 
tive force in American life. But a plain and 
not unobservant American, if no historian, 
believes still that it was not so much a matter 
of numbers or constructive statesmanship in 
colonial and federal days as of high and per- 
vading sentiment. It was what the Pilgrims 
were that mattered — how they thought and 
lived told the story. It is not so important, 
perhaps, if the men of Boston and the other 
people on Massachusetts Bay fill more pages 
in political and military history than the plain 
men of Plymouth, Sandwich, Barnstable and 
Provincetown. 



The Environment of the Sea 277 

When the Mayflower anchored in the outer 
haven of the Cape, and her tired voyagers 
waded to shore, and when, after cold and 
stormy search, they landed on the Plymouth 
side of the Bay, they fixed the destiny of a 
continent. They lived and died on the borders 
of Cape Cod Bay, and thither others came to 
fill up their shrinking numbers. All these were 
forerunners of Massachusetts, of Rhode Island 
and Connecticut, of all New England. In 
time New England passed into New York, and 
from New York to Ohio, and Wisconsin. 
Within the memory of our older men, Iowa, 
Nebraska, Colorado and Oregon have felt the 
pulse of the Puritan energy. 

In morals and religion, in constitutions and 
laws, in trade and education, old England laid 
hold of the outstretched Cape, and thence 
began its march to the western sea. No other 
continent entangles itself in the sea with a 
land just like the Cape. It is long and narrow 
and crooked ; it is of low relief, of frail materi- 
als, changeable and poor, exposed to wind and 
wave — it is land, but land ruled by water, its 
sands and storms, its herbs and trees, its men 
and its daily tasks controlled by the sea. 



INDEX 



Agassiz, Louis, glacial theory 

referred to, 46 
Agriculture, new life in, 158- 

163 
Alden, John, Duxbury home 

of, 19 
Alden, Priscilla, Duxbury 

home of, 19 
Ames, Fisher, cited, 187 
Apples on the Cape, 146- 

147 

Artist colony, at Province- 
town, 139 

Asparagus, 158 

Attaquin, Hotel, 61 



B 



Ballston Beach, 43 

Barnstable, decline of shipping, 
207-208; origin of name, 
103; oysters in, 202-203; 
population of, 237; settle- 
ment of, 23; site of village, 
in; village described, 120- 
124 

Barnstable Fair, 122 

Barnstable Harbor, missed by 
exploring party, 8 

Bayberry candles, 173-174 

Beach grass, 94, 96-99 

Bedrock, in the Old Colony, 

33-34 
Billingsgate, 105 
Billingsgate Light, 83, 216 
Billington family, 19 
Billington Sea, 18, 65 



Blackfish, 184-185 

Boulders, of the glacial drift, 
58-59 

Bourne, name of town, 104- 
105 

Bourne Hill, 38, 109 

Bourne, Richard, 104-105, 
251 

Bradford, William, cited on 
Plymouth soil, 14; History 
cited, 36; manuscript, 20 

Brewster, town of, early days 
of, 24; name of, 105; popu- 
lation of, 237; shipmasters 
in, 209 

Brewster, William, Duxbury 
home of, 19 

Brick-making, 1 71-172 

Bushnell, Rev. Horace, cited, 

255 
Buzzards Bay, shores of, 70, 
86-87 



Cahoon's Hollow, 43 

Camp Grounds, Yarmouth, 

situation of, 39 
Canal, the Cape Cod, 220- 

226 
Cape Cod, limits of, 15; name 

of, 101-102; origin of, 32-68; 

unique, 3 
Centerville Beach, 85-86 
Cereals, in the Old Colony, 

I 5 I 
Champlain, visit of, 6 

Channing, Professor Edward, 

quoted, 28 



279 



28o 



Index 



Chatham, 130-133; lights at, 
216; location of village of, 
no; name of, 104; oysters 
at, 202; population of, 237; 
salt industry in, 168; ship- 
ping of, 210 
Chatham Bars, surf on, 131 
Clam, hardshell, 199-200; soft- 
shell, 203 
Clark's Island, 9, 85 
Clay Pounds, the, 57, 108, 215 
Cleveland, Grover, 61, 119 
Cliffs of Cape Cod, 42, 71 
Climate, of the Old Colony, 

260-264 
Coal, barge traffic in, 205 
Codfish, 180, 188, 190-191 
Cole's Hill, burials on, 13 
Corey fruit farm, 147-148 
Corn, Indian, 7, 144-145 
Cotuit, oysters at, 203 ; site of, 

113 
Craigsville Beach, 85-86 
Cranberries, 123, 153-156 

D 

Dangerfield, early name of 
Truro, 25, 103 

Davis, Wendell, cited, 223 

Dead Neck, 86 

De Monts, expedition of, 6 

Dennis, 38, 40; name of, 105; 
scallop fishing in, 201 ; ship- 
ping of, 208 ; salt industry in, 
167 

Dunes of Cape Cod, 88-100 

Duxbury, Mayflower families 
in, 19 

Duxbury Bay, 15 

Duxbury Beach, 9 

Dwight, Timothy, 30, 74, 98- 
99, 271-272; salt industry, 
169-170 



E 



Eastham, asparagus in, 158; 
history of, 24; Indian name 
of, 104; population of, 237; 



salt industry in, 168; ship- 
ping of, 210 

East Harbor, 63, 83 

Elizabeth Islands, 36 

Environment, influence of, 
257-260 

Everett, William, 253 



Falmouth, 127-129; bays on 
shore of, 53-54; founding of, 
26-27; Indian names in, 
104, 105; population of, 237; 
Portuguese in, 244-245 ; sea- 
men's memorial in, 264; 
shellfish in, 203; site of vil- 
lage of, 1 1 2-1 13; straw- 
berries in, 156-157; tax 
valuations in, 176-178 

Farm Bureau, Cape Cod, 158- 
160 

Faunce, Elder Thomas, 253 

Faunce, President W. H. P., 

253 

Finns, on Cape Cod, 247; in 
town of Barnstable, 122 

Fish, refrigerator plants for, 
193; waste disposal, 193; 
weirs, 192-193 

Fishing, early Pilgrim, 181- 
182; colonial develop- 
ment of, 185-186; causes of 
recent decline, 188-190; 
freshwater, 195 

Forest Dale, Lombard ranch 
at, 163 

Forests, 94-95, no, 142-143; 
State nursery, 164-165 

Freeman family, 22 

Freeman, Frederick, cited, 32 

Freeman, Rev. James, 44, 215 

Fruit-growing, in the Old 
Colony, 151 



German's Hill, 109 
Glacial deposits, succession of, 
68 



Index 



281 



Glacier, the Cape Cod, 50-51; 

of Buzzards Bay, 51 
Glass industry, 172 
Gorham, Captain John, 252 
Gorham, Nathaniel, 252, 253 
Gosnold, Bartholomew, in 

Provincetown Harbor, 5 
Great Marshes, the, 112, 122, 

149-150 
Grist mills, 1 70-1 71 
Gurnet, physical character of, 

84-85 
Gurnet Lights, 4 

H 

Harwich, founding of, 23-24; 

sea captains in, 209 
Hatchville, ranch at, 1 61-162 
Herring fisheries, 193-195 
High Head, 42, 45, 71, 76 
Highland Light, 4, 215-216; 

Cliffs at, 57, 72, 108-109 
Highways on Cape Cod, 228- 

231 
Hitchcock, Dr. Edward, on the 

Cape Cod glacier, 46-47; on 

the sands of the Cape, 141 
Humane Society, the, refuge 

huts of, 44, 217-218 
Hyannis, 124-127; name of, 

106; site of, 113 



Italians on the Cape, 247 
Iyanough, Indian Chief, 23, 
106 



Jefferson, Joseph, 61 , 101, 

119 
Jeremiah's Gutter, 80-82 
Jones River, 15 

K 

Keith Car Works, 173 
Kettle holes, glacial, 41, 51- 

52 
Kingston Bay, 15 



Lakes, of Cape Cod, 52-53; of 
the Old Colony, 59-64; 
names of, 106-108; origin of, 

4 1 . 

Lewis Bay, 64 

Life-saving stations, 219-220 

Lighthouses, 215-217 

Lightships, 217 

Lincoln, Joseph C, 267 

Lombard, Dr., ranch at Forest 

Dale, 163 
Longnook, valley in Truro, 43 
Lyde, Professor L. W., cited, 

259, 260 
Lysll, Sir Charles, 46 

M 

McFarland, R., History of 
Fisheries, cited, 187 

Mackerel fishing, 188 

Mails, early, 231-232 

Manomet, Cliffs of, 18, 84 

Manomet, Hill, 39, 46, 109 

Manufacturing in the Old Col- 
ony, 166-167 

Maps of Old Colony, Note, 
67-68 

Marsh lands, salt, 148-150; 
fresh, 64-65 

Marshfield, home of the Wins- 
lows, 20 

Marston's Mills, name of, 
106 

Martha's Vineyard, physical 
features of, 27; population 
of, 238 

Mashpee, name of, 104; people 
of, 250-252; population of, 
237 

Mashpee River, herring in, 
194 

Mayflower, the, 3-4, 6 

Menauhant, 86 

Mills, 1 70-1 7 1 

Monamoyick, 104 

Monomoy, 74, 79, 88, 130 

Monumet River, 66 



282 



Index 



Moon cursing, 270 

Moraines, Plymouth to Fal- 
mouth, 37; Sandwich to 
Orleans, 37-38; on Nan- 
tucket and Martha's Vine- 
yard, 48 

Morison, Dr. Samuel E., 252 

Mourt's Relation, cited, 15 

N 

Names, 1 01- 109; English, 103- 
104; Indian, 104-105, 108 

Nantucket, physical features 
of, 27; population of, 238 

Nantucket Shoals, 6, 55, 213- 
214 

Nantucket Sound, 214 

Nauset, Beach, 79-80 

Nauset, dunes of, 88; early 
name of Eastham, 104; 
plains of, 41; removal from 
Plymouth to, 21 

New Bedford, port for Portu- 
guese, 242-243 

Nobscusset, 104 

Nobska Light, traffic near, 
205 

North Truro, name of, 106 

Nursery industry, 163-165 



O 



Old Colony, the, limits of, 

15-16 
Onset, village of, 15 
Orleans, 133-135; location of 

village of, no, 113-114; 

name of, 105; Shipping of, 

209-210 
Osterville, harbor of, 86; name 

of, 106; oysters at, 203 
Otis, Harrison Gray, 252 
Otis, John, Senior, 252 
Otis, John, Junior, 252 
Otis, James, 252 
Outwash plain of Cape Cod, 

40 
Oysters, 201-203 



Palfrey, Professor J. G., 212- 

213, 253 
Pamet, early name of Truro, 

25, 103 

Pamet River, 36, 43 

Peaked Hill Bar, 77 

Peat, 65 

Penzance, 36 

Pier Head, 9 

Pilgrims, the, landing of, 10; 
influence of, 276-277 

Pilgrim Monument, 4; view of 
dunes from, 90 

Plymouth, 140; fisheries of, 
186, 187; manufactures in, 
174; name of, 6; not highly 
marine, 206; salt industry in, 
167; tourists in, 17 

Plymouth Beach, 84 

Plymouth County, farm lands 
in, 150; County, population 
of, 238-239 

Pollock's Rip, 131, 217 

Poponesset, 86 

Population, 233 

Portuguese, the, in Barnstable 
County, 240-247; fruit-rais- 
ing by, 156-157 

Powder Hole, 63 

Pring, Martin, stay in Ply- 
mouth Harbor, 5 

Province lands, dunes of, 88- 

9i 

Provincetown, 137-140; agri- 
culture in, 166; early history 
of, 25-26; fisheries of, 186, 
188; name of, 105; popu- 
lation of, 236; Portuguese 
in, 240-241; shipping of, 
211 

Q 

Quahaug, the, 203 
Quisset Harbor, 64 

R 

Race Point Light, 216 
Race Run, 77, 90 



Index 



283 



Railroads, in the Old Colony, 

227-230 
Rich, Rev. Shebnah, cited, 

226 



St. George's Shoals, 55 

Sagamore, 114-115; car works 
at, 173 

Salt Hay, 148-150 

Salt-making, 167-170 

Samoset, 1 80-1 81 

Sand dunes, 88-100 

Sandwich, 1 15-120; fish hatch- 
ery at, 195; glass factory at, 
172; location of, in; not 
maritime, 206; settlement of, 
21-22 

Sandy Hook, 78 

Sandy Neck, 23, 122-123; 
dunes of, 88 

Saquish Head, 9, 85 

Sawmills, 170 

Scallop, the, 200-201 

Scargo Hill, 38, 109 

Scorton Neck, 118 

Shaler, N. S., 128, 273 

Sharks, 185 

Shaw, Chief Justice, 207-208, 

253 
Shellfish, decline of, 198-200 
Shipbuilding, 171-172 
Shipwrecks, about Cape Cod, 

214-215 
Shoot Flying Hill, 38, 108 
Small, Isaac Morton, 72 
Smith, Captain John, maps 

Old Colony shores, 6; names 

New England, 102 
South Channel Glacier, 55-56 
Stage Harbor, 64, 74, 130, 

132 
Standish, Miles, monument 

to, 1; Duxbury home of, 3, 

19-20; excursions from Pro- 

vincetown Harbor, 43 ; 

excursion to Barnstable Bay, 

23 , • 

Strawberries, Cape product of, 

156-157 



Succanesset, 104 

Swifts, the, of Chicago, 253 



Telegraph Hill, 109 
Telegraph lines, 232 
Thoreau, H. D., 30, 92, in, 

134, 135, 138, 141, 169, 

184 
Tower, W. S., History of New 

England Whaling cited, 195- 

196 
Town Brook, 1 1 , 65-66 
Town Cove, 79, 133, 135 
Town Neck, in Sandwich, 117- 

118 
Treat, Rev. Samuel, burial of, 

262 
Truro, Cape products in, 173- 

174; early history of, 25; 

fish- waste disposal in, 193; 

founding of, 25; location of, 

no, 114; name of, 103-104; 

population of, 236-237; salt 

industry in, 168; shipping of, 

210; views from 1-2 
Tudor, Frederic, on Cape 

farming, 163 
Tupper House, Sandwich, 22 
Turpentine industry, 171 



Van Dyke, Henry, cited, 267- 

268 
Vegetable crops, 158-159 
Vikings, the, and Cape Cod, 

5 
Vineyard Sound, 27 

W 

Waquoit Shore, 86 
Wareham, village of, 15 
Webster, Daniel, at Hotel 

Attaquin, 61 ; fishing guide 

of, 119 



284 



Index 



Wellfieet, 135-137; fisheries of, 

188; founding of, 24; harbor 

of, 83, 84; location of, no; 

name of, 105; oysters at, 

202; population of, 237; 

shipping of, 210, 21 1-2 1 2 
Whale fishing, beginnings of, 

183-184; large growth of, 

196-198 
Whido, the pirate ship, 81 
White, Peregrine, 20 
White, Susannah, 20 
Whitman, Rev. Levi, 215 
Wianno, name of, 106 
Wind work, on Cape Cod, 

88-91 
Windmills, 29, 171 
Winslow, Governor Josiah, 

Marshfield home of, 20 
Winslow's Relation, cited, 143, 

260-261 



Winsor, J., reference to Nar- 
rative and Critical History, 

5 

Winthrop, James, 222 
Wood, General Leonard, 253 
Woods Hole, 27, 137; Fish 
Commission at, 195; loca- 
tion of, 112; name of, 106; 
situation of, 37; traffic of, 
206-207 
Woodworth, Professor Jay 
Backus, acknowledgment, 
see P/eface; cited, 68 



Yarmouth, beginnings of, 23; 
camp grounds in, 39; names 
of, 103, 104; population of, 
237; salt industry in, 169 

Yarmouth Port, 123 







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